NEWS OF THE WEEK
NSF ROLLS OUT STIMULUS PLAN FUNDING: Agency will use money to
support mix of new and existing programs
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SF WILL USE $2.6 BILLION of its stimulus re-
covery act money to fund projects and proposals already in the pipeline, according to the agency. It will invest the remaining $400 million of its American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA) allocation in a pair of new solicitations for grant proposals to update labs and improve instrument availability. “The President is depending on NSF to help lead the nation to a new era of discovery and innovation,” NSF Director Arden L. Bement Jr. said in a statement. “Investments in research and education build a strong economic foundation for the country.” Because NSF didn’t get additional funds to administer ARRA money SERGEY MIROV/U OF ALABAMA
The “optical nose” being developed at the University of Alabama is an example of a project that could benefit from NSF’s ARRA funds.
RSC ACQUIRES CHEMICAL DATABASE DIGITAL RESOURCES: Repository offers
free structure and property data
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RITAIN’S ROYAL SOCIETY of Chemistry (RSC)
has acquired ChemSpider, a free database of 21 million chemical structures and associated information including properties, commercial sources, and links to related journal articles. The database is periodically expanded with publicly available chemical information and material provided by collaborators and the public on a volunteer basis. The association with RSC provides stability and credence to ChemSpider, says Antony Williams, the cheminformatics consultant who was principally responsible for its development. Williams will serve as vice president of strategic development for ChemSpider at RSC. He hopes the resource will become a “central hub for information” for users looking for publications about chemical compounds; for information about synthesis, toxicity, and purchasing; for blogs and Wikis; or for an environment in which to collaborate with other researchers. From RSC’s perspective, ChemSpider furthers the WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG
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and there is a large backlog of promising proposals, “the NSF approach makes sense as an effective way to quickly distribute the recovery act funds,” says Glenn Ruskin, director of the ACS Office of Public Affairs. Joanne P. Carney, director of the Center for Science, Technology & Congress at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, agrees. NSF’s approach is “very pragmatic and logical” given the number of grant proposals they’ve been unable to fund and the urgency with which the ARRA funds must be spent, she says. The ARRA funds set aside for new solicitations will be divided equally between facility updgrades and lab instrumentation purchases. NSF will invest $200 million to fund repairs and renovations to existing academic research facilities. Projects will be awarded up to $10 million each and can include research spaces such as buildings, mobile research facilities, and virtual facilities that use broadband-based technologies to bring scientists together. The other $200 million will fund the purchase and development of shared-use instruments. Up to $6 million each will go to individual projects. Passed in February, ARRA gives federal agencies 60 days to submit plans detailing how they would use the money. NSF has complied with that requirement, a spokesman says. But the agency had to wait for Congress and the White House Office of Management & Budget to approve its plans before they could be released. According to the spokesman, the approvals just took a while to get done.—SUSAN MORRISSEY
society’s mission to “advance the chemical sciences and to disseminate chemistry,” says Graham McCann, RSC’s business manager for ChemSpider. The society hasn’t yet settled on a business model for funding ChemSpider, but it hopes the acquisition will “lead to a wealth of opportunities for collaboration” with publishers, chemical producers and vendors, and others, McCann says. Through its existing Project Prospect initiative, RSC already provides links between a compound mentioned in one of its journal articles to data about the compound and to other RSC journal articles that mention the compound. “With ChemSpider as a centralized resource for the whole publishing community, that service can now rise up a level” so other publishers can establish similar links in their own journals, McCann says. Other major databases of chemical compounds include the CAS Registry—the world’s largest such database, with more than 45 million substances—produced by Chemical Abstracts Service, a division of the American Chemical Society; and the National Institutes of Health’s PubChem database. “CAS has worked with Williams in the past,” CAS President Robert J. Massie notes. “We join everyone who is interested in the advance of chemical information in recognizing his considerable contributions. We are delighted to see that his creativity and enthusiasm will continue to benefit the chemical enterprise.”— SOPHIE ROVNER
MAY 18, 2009
