By LJ Staff

On November 4, the lights went out on PubSCIENCE, the U.S. Department of Energy's fledgling effort to offer a free multi-disciplined database in the physical sciences. Made available October 1, 1999, PubSCIENCE, allowed user to search across abstracts and citations of multiple publishers at no cost. PubSCIENCE was intended to facilitate research for physical scientists much the same way that PubMed Central does for the life sciences. However, the effort quickly became the target of an intense lobbying campaign, spearheaded by the Washington-based Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), a coalition of for-profit and non-profit members including Reed Elsevier, ISI, Chemical Abstracts Services and Cambridge Scientific Abstracts.

The SIIA claimed that such a service competed with their services, and argued that government initiatives should confine themselves to government information only, and not act as a secondary publisher. Librarians and scientists say the closing of PubSCIENCE is a chilling development and could call into question a number of worthy government-supported information programs, including PubMed Central. Of particular note, the Department of Energy decided to close the service despite overwhelming support solicited through its web site. In total, 230 comments supported PubSCIENCE versus seven from publishers asking it be taken down. Further angering supporters, the DOE also declined to solicit comments in the Federal Register, despite a plea from the American Library Association to do so, leading to librarians to believe that the decision to close the service was pre-determined, based on the SIIA lobbying effort and not on its usefulness to the public.