I published a link to the article on the CHMINF-L list on July 7th.
I informed the ACS Board about the article on July 9th and asked them to consider what action should be taken
I became aware that the article had disappeared today (July 14th) and then discovered that the article had been cached by Google
Tuesday, 14 July 2009
Article summarising ACS vs LeadScope lawsuit in RSC Law Group Newsletter - CENSORED
Link to the newsletter after censorship
http://rsc.org/images/Newsletter1_tcm18-154528.pdf
and here is the link to the original full text of the article
http://74.125.153.132/search?q=cache:3RNheBeVLvYJ:rsc.org/images/Newsletter1_tcm18-154528.pdf+News+from+the+US+-+ACS+loses+legal+battle&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=de
and here is the full text:
News from the US — ACS loses legal battle
The RSC's sister organisation in the US, the American Chemical Society, stands to lose a significant amount of its financial reserves, having been unsuccessful in pursuing protracted and expensive litigation against three former employees. Don Lewis explains this unfortunate story below.
On April 1, 2009, ACS agreed to pay a $36 million bond to stay execution of an Ohio judgment in the case of ACS v LeadScope. Payment of the bond will allow ACS to continue to pursue various post-trial motions without first satisfying the judgment.
ACS management has been criticized by both the public and its membership for prosecuting this case with a lack of openness. There are also suggestions that ACS was on the wrong side of this case and that management of the affair is now compromising ACS finances.
In 1977, three ACS employees working within the Chemical Abstracts Service division (CAS) left ACS to form LeadScope, Inc., a chemical informatics company. LeadScope eventually developed and launched several successful chemical informatics software programs and databases, useful in the drug discovery area. These LeadScope products potentially competed with ACS chemical informatics products.
In 2002, ACS filed a suit against LeadScope in Ohio, alleging that the three former ACS employees misappropriated ACS proprietary information when they terminated their ACS employment and used the information to develop, patent, and market LeadScope software products in the area of chemical informatics. LeadScope denied the allegation and counterclaimed that the ACS engaged in defamation, tortious interference with business relations, unfair competition, and deceptive trade practices against LeadScope.
Six years of litigation then ensued, culminating with a six week trial.
On March 27, 2008, an Ohio jury found that ACS's claim lacked merit, but that the first three counterclaims by LeadScope were valid. The jury further found that the ACS was liable to LeadScope Inc. for $19 million in compensatory damages and $7.5 million in punitive damages. The judge overseeing the trial subsequently ruled that the ACS was also liable for Lead-Scope's attorney fees. The legal expenses incurred to date by the ACS's own legal counsel were not disclosed.
Furthermore, no estimate of future legal costs for either party has been disclosed for the on-going post-trial motions. Interest on the original judgment is running at about $7,000/day.
The first news of this litigation in C&E News occurred on March 28, 2008, i.e., one day after the trial findings. With out commenting on the merit or wisdom of the action, various members of the ACS Division Chemistry and the Law (CHAL) have questioned the lack of openness by ACS management regarding the initiation and conduct of the action. CHAL has not been consulted by ACS management on this action.
In pursuit of its mission of advancing science through openness, ACS has served its members well by publishing and disseminating chemical information and by the provision of chemical informatics services.
Issues of pricing and marketing practices for these enterprises have been reasonably managed by the ACS with some openness so as to balance the needs of enterprise sustainability and advancement of ACS mission. However, if ACS business practices have been accurately characterized by the Ohio jury, there is now a new problem. Business practices that intentionally interfere with the development of chemical informatics software by third parties do not advance science.
The Ohio jury findings would argue that ACS management could benefit from increased openness, particularly in enterprises of high profitability.
Science and ACS members might have been better served if the 1977 ACS chemical informatics project had been completely open.
There is a sense that, in the present instance, the ACS mission may have been ignored by ACS management.
The Ohio jury may succeed where ACS's critics have failed. ACS unrestricted reserves declined from $212 million at the end of 2007 to $60 million at the end of 2008, due to a combination of investment losses and accounting changes. No provision was made for the Lead-Scope judgment or the $35.5 million bond. The Ohio jury's damage findings, together with economic necessity, may compel ACS to reform its business practices in order to maintain its enterprise sustainability.
Dr. Donald G Lewis,
Catalyst Law Group,
San Diego, CA
http://rsc.org/images/Newsletter1_tcm18-154528.pdf
and here is the link to the original full text of the article
http://74.125.153.132/search?q=cache:3RNheBeVLvYJ:rsc.org/images/Newsletter1_tcm18-154528.pdf+News+from+the+US+-+ACS+loses+legal+battle&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=de
and here is the full text:
News from the US — ACS loses legal battle
The RSC's sister organisation in the US, the American Chemical Society, stands to lose a significant amount of its financial reserves, having been unsuccessful in pursuing protracted and expensive litigation against three former employees. Don Lewis explains this unfortunate story below.
On April 1, 2009, ACS agreed to pay a $36 million bond to stay execution of an Ohio judgment in the case of ACS v LeadScope. Payment of the bond will allow ACS to continue to pursue various post-trial motions without first satisfying the judgment.
ACS management has been criticized by both the public and its membership for prosecuting this case with a lack of openness. There are also suggestions that ACS was on the wrong side of this case and that management of the affair is now compromising ACS finances.
In 1977, three ACS employees working within the Chemical Abstracts Service division (CAS) left ACS to form LeadScope, Inc., a chemical informatics company. LeadScope eventually developed and launched several successful chemical informatics software programs and databases, useful in the drug discovery area. These LeadScope products potentially competed with ACS chemical informatics products.
In 2002, ACS filed a suit against LeadScope in Ohio, alleging that the three former ACS employees misappropriated ACS proprietary information when they terminated their ACS employment and used the information to develop, patent, and market LeadScope software products in the area of chemical informatics. LeadScope denied the allegation and counterclaimed that the ACS engaged in defamation, tortious interference with business relations, unfair competition, and deceptive trade practices against LeadScope.
Six years of litigation then ensued, culminating with a six week trial.
On March 27, 2008, an Ohio jury found that ACS's claim lacked merit, but that the first three counterclaims by LeadScope were valid. The jury further found that the ACS was liable to LeadScope Inc. for $19 million in compensatory damages and $7.5 million in punitive damages. The judge overseeing the trial subsequently ruled that the ACS was also liable for Lead-Scope's attorney fees. The legal expenses incurred to date by the ACS's own legal counsel were not disclosed.
Furthermore, no estimate of future legal costs for either party has been disclosed for the on-going post-trial motions. Interest on the original judgment is running at about $7,000/day.
The first news of this litigation in C&E News occurred on March 28, 2008, i.e., one day after the trial findings. With out commenting on the merit or wisdom of the action, various members of the ACS Division Chemistry and the Law (CHAL) have questioned the lack of openness by ACS management regarding the initiation and conduct of the action. CHAL has not been consulted by ACS management on this action.
In pursuit of its mission of advancing science through openness, ACS has served its members well by publishing and disseminating chemical information and by the provision of chemical informatics services.
Issues of pricing and marketing practices for these enterprises have been reasonably managed by the ACS with some openness so as to balance the needs of enterprise sustainability and advancement of ACS mission. However, if ACS business practices have been accurately characterized by the Ohio jury, there is now a new problem. Business practices that intentionally interfere with the development of chemical informatics software by third parties do not advance science.
The Ohio jury findings would argue that ACS management could benefit from increased openness, particularly in enterprises of high profitability.
Science and ACS members might have been better served if the 1977 ACS chemical informatics project had been completely open.
There is a sense that, in the present instance, the ACS mission may have been ignored by ACS management.
The Ohio jury may succeed where ACS's critics have failed. ACS unrestricted reserves declined from $212 million at the end of 2007 to $60 million at the end of 2008, due to a combination of investment losses and accounting changes. No provision was made for the Lead-Scope judgment or the $35.5 million bond. The Ohio jury's damage findings, together with economic necessity, may compel ACS to reform its business practices in order to maintain its enterprise sustainability.
Dr. Donald G Lewis,
Catalyst Law Group,
San Diego, CA
Friday, 10 April 2009
InCHI article withdrawn by Outsell
Chemical Bonding InChI by InChI
Image of Daniel Pollock
By Daniel Pollock
March 30, 2009
Important Details: The International Chemical Identifier (InChI - pronounced “INchee”), was developed several years ago by chemistry’s governing body, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (Iupac), together with the US government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). InChIs are generated by a free computer algorithm which analyses a chemical structure to provide a unique, machine-readable identifier - much like an ISBN for chemical substances. Tracing its roots back to a paper in 2003, its aim is to serve as a single public, industry-standard format for identifying chemical structures and so form a basis for sharing chemical information on the web. The first formal release was in August 2006.
With over 40 million chemical substances currently known to exist, and with well over 100 indexes available, organising, searching and cross-referencing substances is a huge challenge. The InChI has seen slow take-up and in an effort to raise enthusiasm for its use, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) worked with ChemZoo (the software team at open-access chemistry search and aggregation engine ChemSpider) to develop a free “InChi resolver”. Launched at the Spring American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting, this can turn an InChI into a shorter, search-engine friendly “InChI key” (a 25-letter code also developed by Iupac and NIST). US Government agencies (such as the National Institutes of Health, NIST, The Cancer Institute, and the FDA) plan to tag entries with InChIs.
Extracting references to substances within the literature is tough, too, due to the nuances of describing the often-complex molecular structures on the written page - many need to be visualised in 3D and to aid readability their complex names are conventionally referred to by numbers within articles. Here the machine-readable InChI is helping the RSC (via its Project Prospect) and now Nature Publishing Group (via the recently launched Nature Chemistry) in pushing towards born-digital journal article services. Both use combinations of automated text mining and manual editorial input to extract and mark up entities within articles and are encouraging authors to add additional metadata to submissions.
* RSC journal articles attach machine-readable InChI codes, SMILES strings and CML (Chemical Markup Language) to chemical names, and cross-reference IUPAC Gold Book terms, Open Biomedical Ontologies (Gene, Sequence and Cell), related RSC articles and link to 2D graphics.
* Nature Chemistry functionality includes InChI and SMILES mark-up, pop-up structures in articles and a common database of NPG proprietary substance pages which can be used as hubs for linking to further information.
Since the InChI is machine-readable, information providers can streamline the identification and cross-referencing substances within journal articles which use InChIs, and as the reliability of automated abstracting techniques improve (e.g OSCAR), economically “retro-tagging” the literature could become a possibility.
Implications: The InChI is an open and non-proprietary standard which can be shared between by competitive players and independently verified. It can therefore facilitate searching across multiple data sources via the open web, and provides a way to connect the various registries of substances in existence.
This in turn speaks to the trend we see across the web, namely that users want the convenience of a one-stop shop search. Scientists want to search “the whole of science” - or at least information held by all providers in their vertical area of interest. So projects such as open access ChemSpider are working towards common point of discovery, allowing users to locate specific information for a chemical structure and then access the data immediately via open access links or have the information necessary to continue their searches into commercially available systems.
The current gold standard for identifying chemical substances are proprietary Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) Registry Numbers, owned and operated by the American Society of Chemistry (ACS). We do not yet know if CAS plans to map its database to InChI. However, given that CAS has been criticised for its proprietary approach in the past, and took until April 2008 to release a web based version of its flagship SciFinder database, in Outsell’s opinion we may have to wait a while yet.
However, we do hope that this is not the case since it is important that information providers do not Balkanize their information if they are not to get lost in the web (see Insights 18 July 2008, Nature Publishing Group Sets the Cat Amongst the Pigeons of Open Access, But Maybe We’re All Missing the Point). The point here is that open standards can benefit all by making information (products) easier to discover, and this speaks to one of the core demands of the networked environment. So, for example, CAS’s index of 40 million substances is not threatened by open standards and, in fact, our view is that mapping CAS numbers to an standard such as InChI can only help to make it more accessible. And with over 20 million substances now indexed by ChemSpider, the InChI could emerge as a - if not the - industry standard index of chemical substances on the web.
Meanwhile, whilst we can see the reaction of the big chemistry publishers and abstraction services, we can reflect on a sobering question: why is it taking government and voluntary contributions to build an industry standard? Surely that should have be the territory of the information providers? In chemistry it seems, as everywhere, the web changes everything.
Image of Daniel Pollock
By Daniel Pollock
March 30, 2009
Important Details: The International Chemical Identifier (InChI - pronounced “INchee”), was developed several years ago by chemistry’s governing body, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (Iupac), together with the US government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). InChIs are generated by a free computer algorithm which analyses a chemical structure to provide a unique, machine-readable identifier - much like an ISBN for chemical substances. Tracing its roots back to a paper in 2003, its aim is to serve as a single public, industry-standard format for identifying chemical structures and so form a basis for sharing chemical information on the web. The first formal release was in August 2006.
With over 40 million chemical substances currently known to exist, and with well over 100 indexes available, organising, searching and cross-referencing substances is a huge challenge. The InChI has seen slow take-up and in an effort to raise enthusiasm for its use, the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) worked with ChemZoo (the software team at open-access chemistry search and aggregation engine ChemSpider) to develop a free “InChi resolver”. Launched at the Spring American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting, this can turn an InChI into a shorter, search-engine friendly “InChI key” (a 25-letter code also developed by Iupac and NIST). US Government agencies (such as the National Institutes of Health, NIST, The Cancer Institute, and the FDA) plan to tag entries with InChIs.
Extracting references to substances within the literature is tough, too, due to the nuances of describing the often-complex molecular structures on the written page - many need to be visualised in 3D and to aid readability their complex names are conventionally referred to by numbers within articles. Here the machine-readable InChI is helping the RSC (via its Project Prospect) and now Nature Publishing Group (via the recently launched Nature Chemistry) in pushing towards born-digital journal article services. Both use combinations of automated text mining and manual editorial input to extract and mark up entities within articles and are encouraging authors to add additional metadata to submissions.
* RSC journal articles attach machine-readable InChI codes, SMILES strings and CML (Chemical Markup Language) to chemical names, and cross-reference IUPAC Gold Book terms, Open Biomedical Ontologies (Gene, Sequence and Cell), related RSC articles and link to 2D graphics.
* Nature Chemistry functionality includes InChI and SMILES mark-up, pop-up structures in articles and a common database of NPG proprietary substance pages which can be used as hubs for linking to further information.
Since the InChI is machine-readable, information providers can streamline the identification and cross-referencing substances within journal articles which use InChIs, and as the reliability of automated abstracting techniques improve (e.g OSCAR), economically “retro-tagging” the literature could become a possibility.
Implications: The InChI is an open and non-proprietary standard which can be shared between by competitive players and independently verified. It can therefore facilitate searching across multiple data sources via the open web, and provides a way to connect the various registries of substances in existence.
This in turn speaks to the trend we see across the web, namely that users want the convenience of a one-stop shop search. Scientists want to search “the whole of science” - or at least information held by all providers in their vertical area of interest. So projects such as open access ChemSpider are working towards common point of discovery, allowing users to locate specific information for a chemical structure and then access the data immediately via open access links or have the information necessary to continue their searches into commercially available systems.
The current gold standard for identifying chemical substances are proprietary Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) Registry Numbers, owned and operated by the American Society of Chemistry (ACS). We do not yet know if CAS plans to map its database to InChI. However, given that CAS has been criticised for its proprietary approach in the past, and took until April 2008 to release a web based version of its flagship SciFinder database, in Outsell’s opinion we may have to wait a while yet.
However, we do hope that this is not the case since it is important that information providers do not Balkanize their information if they are not to get lost in the web (see Insights 18 July 2008, Nature Publishing Group Sets the Cat Amongst the Pigeons of Open Access, But Maybe We’re All Missing the Point). The point here is that open standards can benefit all by making information (products) easier to discover, and this speaks to one of the core demands of the networked environment. So, for example, CAS’s index of 40 million substances is not threatened by open standards and, in fact, our view is that mapping CAS numbers to an standard such as InChI can only help to make it more accessible. And with over 20 million substances now indexed by ChemSpider, the InChI could emerge as a - if not the - industry standard index of chemical substances on the web.
Meanwhile, whilst we can see the reaction of the big chemistry publishers and abstraction services, we can reflect on a sobering question: why is it taking government and voluntary contributions to build an industry standard? Surely that should have be the territory of the information providers? In chemistry it seems, as everywhere, the web changes everything.
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