Free Web Research Link Closed Under Pressure From Pay Sites

The Energy Department has shut down a popular Internet site that catalogued government and academic science research, in response to corporate complaints that it competed with similar commercial services.

By Jonathan Krim
Washington Post Staff Writer

Department officials said abandoning PubScience, an electronic service that cross-indexed and searched roughly 2 million government reports and academic articles, will save the government $200,000 a year because two equivalent services exist in the private sector.

The decision alarmed researchers in and out of the federal government, who worry that services operated by other federal agencies might be forced to give way to private gatekeepers that would control access to information and research, much of which was created with public money. Government agencies maintain extensive databases and search engines for information on medicine, agriculture, finance and other disciplines.

"What we worry about is what’s next," said Charles A. Hamaker, associate librarian at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

PubScience, which began on paper in the late 1940s and went online in 1999, offered one-stop shopping for people looking for literature on energy and science topics.

Searching on PubScience was free, and the service provided brief summaries of articles or reports that related to requested topics. The service would link either to full texts that were or to a payment systems for information that was for sale.

Two commercial equivalents, Scirus and Infotrieve, operate much the same way. They are owned by database companies that publish or make available academic literature for a fee, but the search function is free.

Energy Department officials acknowledge that they were lobbied frequently by the sites’ owners and their trade group, the Software and Information Industry Association. But officials said they had been tracking the development of private-sector services carefully to be sure that similar services were offered at no cost before closing PubScience.

"From DOE’s point of view, this is a success," said Walter L. Warnick, director of the Office of Scientific and Technical Information, which put together and managed the site. "We have created a model that others are now pursuing. Our Web patrons are now being served without additional expense to the government."

Hamaker and others disagreed. They said they fear that offering search functions free is a way for the database companies to lure users to become dependent on their services.

"It’s the heroin pusher’s approach to marketing," said Martin Blume, editor in chief of the American Physical Society, which publishes several journals on physics.

In the case of Scirus, Hamaker said the search engine pushes users toward content owned by its corporate parent Elsevier Science, part of a European database company. An Elsevier spokesman referred questions to the industry trade association. Infotrieve did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Researchers acknowledge that sophisticated research institutions generally would rely on premium databases such as ISI Web of Science, operated by Thomson Corp. of Canada. The service can cost as much as $100,000 a year.

But they say that for the general public and researchers at small institutions such as public libraries, PubScience was an invaluable tool for surveying what information existed on a given topic.

"For general awareness of what was available, it was a bargain to the world, a gift to the world," Hamaker said.

Researchers also wonder why companies that sell information would want to diminish the number of search opportunities that lead to articles that people might purchase.

David LeDuc, public policy director of the SIIA, said the issue is whether there should be publicly funded competition for commercial search services.

LeDuc said free government services could drive out corporate competition, thus reducing the choice available to consumers. He said he doubts that Scirus or Infotrieve intend to start charging for searches.

"That’s not how the Internet works," he said, arguing that an increasing amount of information is available online free. But ultimately, he said, the market should decide.

LeDuc said the software association is looking at other publicly funded Web sites after its success with PubScience, whose closing was reported last week by Federal Computer Week. "We monitor what governments do," LeDuc said. "There are two [services] that we’ve been made aware of. . . . They are both in the proposed stages."

Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the American Library Association’s Washington office, said the software group’s philosophy will lead to more expensive access to information already paid for by taxpayers.

"Our fear is that this is the beginning of privatizing government services for profit," she said.

In addition to government reports, many academic studies and journals are enabled by public funding of public colleges and universities.

Private companies are being allowed to "take information that has been created with tax dollars, they turn around, make some slight little change, and then they start selling it," Sheketoff said.

Other government research arms also are concerned.

Kent A. Smith, deputy director of the National Library of Medicine and chairman of an interagency group of federal providers of scientific and technical information, said the group was not happy that PubScience was taken down.

"We believe there is a need to ensure open access for the public to information created by taxpayer dollars," Smith said. "We think that’s essential."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17568-2002Nov20.html