The workshop - Building and Owning Biotechnology Databases was
held at the Golden Tulip Hotel, Purmerend, The Netherlands on 22-23 September
1998. It was organised by The Biotechnology Information Strategic Forum,
with support from DGXII of the Commission of the European Communities.
SWISS-PROT, the implications for a database wishing to raise revenue -- Graham Cameron, Joint Head of Outstation, EMBL Outstation - the European Bioinformatics Institute
SWISS-PROT was created by Amos Bairoch in 1986 at the University of Geneva. Soon after, in 1987, a collaboration between the University of Geneva and EMBL began which is still in place today although it can now be better described as an equal partnership between EMBL and the new Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB). Bairoch himself has the ultimate responsibility for the database’s scientific content and format.
SWISS-PROT is a curated, added-value, database which offers information on the sequence and function of proteins. These sequences will be the target of a huge amount of future research effort as they are the key to understanding the biological processes we all wish to understand. The majority of SWISS-PROT entries come from translations of public nucleotide sequence data obtained from the EMBL Hinxton Outstation, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). More than two million nucleotide sequences have now been determined, which results in some 250,000 protein sequences. However only 7000 protein structures are known.
SWISS-PROT is a major collaborative effort drawing not only on the staff at the above institutes but also on the support of experts throughout the world. It is regarded as crucial to research in both the academic and commercial sectors and it is clear that its future must be rendered secure. To-date, it has been funded as part of the R&D activities of the host institutes, but the database is increasingly expensive to produce and so long term funding is required to guarantee its future. Furthermore, it is probably not fair to ask for adequate public funding for today's data flow so new ways of financing the production and maintenance of this resource are needed.
The database owners have therefore looked at various solutions to raising revenue and have decided that the simplest is to ask commercial users for a licence fee. However, as the product is largely derived from the academic sector, there will be no fee for academic users so the full cost will fall upon the commercial world. All income will be used at SIB and the EBI for SWISS-PROT.
At the same time, neither the EBI nor the SIB feel the need to strictly police the service. They hope to follow a theme analogous to the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Licence Fee, namely that users should be honest and pay the fee: policing the subscriptions must not cost more than the earned income.
In practice this means that as from Release 37, SWISS-PROT will be copyrighted. However the present methods of access will remain the same for all users although the commercial users will be informed that they are liable to pay a license fee irrespective of method of access. Services providers need not change their services although the owners will request them to provide lists of commercial users so that companies using these "secondary services" can be asked for license fees.
Another difficulty might arise because SWISS-PROT is incorporated into many other databases. The current thinking is not to charge if the result of this incorporation is not a potential competitor for SWISS-PROT but in reality each case will have to be discussed. In addition, there will be no license fee for education and training uses, and none for searching but not downloading, nor for printing entries (within reason) in publications.
One key need for the builders of SWISS-PROT is to ensure that service providers maintain the integrity and quality of the database. Therefore, service providers must:
Again, exceptions will be considered, especially in the grey area between academic and commercial uses and the builders are also willing to accept new formats which do not degrade the database.
This experiment is just starting. The database builders have posted a series of notices alerting the bioinformatics community to these changes and are alert to handling the numerous queries that are coming in. The fee range has been set (table 1), and so far (September 1998) some 8 licenses have been finalised with 40 in late stages of negotiation and 200 in early stages of negotiation. There are more than 2000 potential customers which should provide an income pool large enough to help sustain this essential resource.
Table 1
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The database owners are well aware that this change of policy may cause some concern; and yet they hope that users will understand that such a vital resource has to be maintained and that this costs an ever increasing amount of money. Two immediate concerns come to mind, the first being that many academics might no longer be happy to support a product that is being sold and secondly, that while until now no-one has felt it worth while competing with SWISS-PROT, new databases might now see their chance to offer a competing service for a competitive fee.
With this in mind, a licensing scheme has been developed which aims to minimise
the impact on scientists' work. We welcome comments on how well we have fulfilled
this aim.