A powerful congressional committee has passed a budget bill which, if enacted, could close down PubScience, a free search service for the physical sciences literature, operated by the US Department of Energy (DoE).

The budget bill, which was passed last week by the House appropriations subcommittee for energy and water development and was expected to be endorsed by the full appropriations committee, is likely have a chilling effect on other government-operated services, including the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central, according to some observers.

Open to suggestions: Walter Warnick says he will take the congressional advice seriously.

The DoE's Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) launched PubScience in 1999 to give physical scientists the kind of free, journal cross-searching facilities already offered to life scientists by PubMed. But the House subcommittee says in its bill that it is concerned that the OSTI is duplicating information services already available from commercial publishers, and urges a careful review of PubScience. This advice is likely to be heeded: “Needless to say, OSTI and DoE will be very responsive to the guidance of Congress,” says Walter Warnick, director of the OSTI.

The subcommittee proposes a 2002 budget for the OSTI of $7.9 million, $1.1 million less than it asked for, and more than $700,000 less than this year's budget. This cut is greater than the running costs of PubScience. Before becoming law, the entire bill has to approved by the full House, agreed with the Senate and signed by President George W. Bush.

The proposal arose after a lobbying campaign aimed against PubScience, spearheaded by the Washington-based Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) on behalf of for-profit and non-profit member companies including Reed Elsevier, ISI, Chemical Abstracts Services and Cambridge Scientific Abstracts.

David LeDuc, an SIIA official, says that PubScience provides a service similar to products offered by the association's members, and “makes it increasingly difficult for these private-sector companies to continue offering their products”. He says that government initiatives should confine themselves to providing access to government information, and not act as secondary publishers.

Arie Jongeman, managing director of Elsevier Science's physical sciences division, says that the subcommittee's proposal means that “people have come to their senses; sanity is prevailing”. He claims that services such as PubScience are often less efficient than outsourcing, and that their true costs can be concealed. Jongeman adds that the appropriators' action “is an important signal that this kind of US governmental support is something which is dangerous and can flip back to zero overnight”.

But one DoE official argues that PubScience is “well anchored in law”, noting that the department's mission explicitly includes the dissemination of scientific information.

And Martin Blume, editor-in-chief of the American Physical Society, which has extensive publishing interests, says that PubScience is not in competition with these “any more than the National Library of Medicine, MedLine, and PubMed are”. He adds: “The concern of the appropriators is not justified.”

But the SIIA is widely expected to attack PubMed next. The better-established life-sciences service, however, may prove to be a difficult target, as the National Library of Medicine, which operates it, has very strong support in the Congress.

There are signs, meanwhile, that the government's role in scientific publishing is becoming a partisan issue. In May, Joe Lieberman (Democrat, Connecticut), chair of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, introduced a bill that would give federal research agencies an explicit mandate to carry out PubScience-like activities. The act explicitly states that agencies should develop websites with links to the servers of outside publishers. The contrast between the two measures would appear to set the stage for a conflict on Capitol Hill between Democrats, who control the Senate, and Republicans, who control the House.

→ http://pubsci.osti.gov

→ http://www.siia.net

→ http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access