Last year, Nature Biotechnology ran an Editorial about the failure of a biological database:

Six weeks ago, the rights to one of biology’s premier public databases were quietly sold to an informatics startup. The database in question, the Biomolecular Interaction Network Database (BIND), is arguably the most comprehensive freely accessible protein-protein interaction database available to the research community. Yet through a combination of bureaucratic delays, Canadian government fiscal nitpicking and a lack of community consensus, this important resource now finds itself on life support, its survival precariously linked to that of Unleashed Informatics, a private venture founded last April with little more than $1.0 million in seed funding from Sun Microsystems. BIND is a database of molecular associations that collates high-throughput data submissions and hand-curated information from the scientific literature……

(From Nature Biotechnology 24, 115; February 2006.)

One correspondent disagreed with the Editorial’s assessment and wrote that in his opinion the enterprise had been a waste of taxpayers’ money.

Rather than arguing for the importance of long-term database funding by granting agencies, BIND’s saga in fact argues for greater caution and more demanding oversight when these agencies elect to fund a database’s initial development.

(W. Busa, Nature Biotechnology 24, 1095; September 2006).

Now, some months later, the journal is able to publish a response from one of BIND’s creators, and from another correspondent in support of the database:

On March 20 this year, Thomson Scientific (Philadelphia) acquired the BIND database together with a stable of software and services through the purchase of Unleashed Informatics (Toronto). These products were originally created by my laboratory using public funds. They were the intellectual property of my former host institution, Mount Sinai Hospital, in accordance with its employment contracts and policies. Confidentiality constraints from the outset of the discussion with Thomson Scientific, which predated Busa’s letter, prevented me from addressing Busa’s comments at the time. I would now like to address several misapprehensions and inaccuracies in his comments……….BIND has always had the broadest scope of any interaction database (all organisms) as well as the deepest annotation (down to atomic three-dimensional structures). BIND curators extracted information from figures—a feat no text mining tool can do and 85% of hand-curated BIND records have information arising from figures. It is the breadth, depth and quality of BIND that led to its commercial acquisition. And this was pursued only after having exhausted all possible means for continued public support…….

(C. Hogue, Nature Biotechnology 25, 971; September 2007.)

Researchers may not mind paying for the luxury of specialized databases, but data registries that cater to a broad set of users should be broadly and freely accessible to the research community. Although the initial development of databases, such as BIND, requires caution and close oversight of budgets, an equally important aim should be to ensure that data repositories of particular utility to the research community remain sustainable and publicly accessible. Databases, such as BIND, should not be left to the private sector. Ensuring public accessibility to data essential for research progress is the responsibility of the central planner, not Adam Smith’s invisible hand in the marketplace.

(K. Wang, Nature Biotechnology 25, 971-972; September 2007.)