I got a mail this morning about an article in Cell:
Analysis
Analysis
India Takes an Open Source Approach to Drug Discovery
Open source software may have been around for 17 years, but using an open source model to speed up drug discovery is a relatively new idea. This month, India is launching a new open source initiative for developing drugs to treat diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV.
Seema Singha
Available online 17 April 2008.
PMR This mentioned many of the things that we have been interested in the Open Science and Blue Obelisk communities. A lot of the people we collaborate with – Jean-Claude Bradley, Rajarshi Guha, Matt Todd and mentioned. This is really exciting. I’d love to tell you about it. It’s great.
But I can’t. The article is closed access. I couldn’t read it at home. If I post a copy of it from Cambridge I will be pursued by Elsevier lawyers.
So here is a really important development. A substantial investment in new ways of developing drugs (and we need new ways, because humans are very poor at discovering drugs and machines are even worse).
If you want to read the article and you don’t belong to a rich university it will cost you 31 USD. It’s just over 2 pages long.
I suspect that most of the scientists in India who might wish to read this won’t have access…
So this is the choice that we need to make…
Some scientists in the UK may not be able to read it either…the STFC library is still working through the issues of the transformation of RAL and DL from ‘phyiscs’ facilities into something a little more multidisciplinary, so Cell isn’t apparently on the menu.
Yes the irony of it is frustrating