Robert Massie: What if you are the authority?

The first full day of the NFAIS meeting concluded with the traditional Miles Conrad Lecture, this year delivered by honoree Robert J. Massie, president of the American Chemical Society’s Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) since 1992.  Massie provided a low-key counterweight to some of the “new information order” rhetoric of many of the previous speakers, addressing the key question for many of the conference participants: What do you do if YOU are the authority?

He began by individually addressing some of the core attributes of the “new order”:

Global. Noting that CAS’ mission has always been to foster the global exchange of chemical information, and that it has operations and partnerships in Germany, China, India, Japan, and the Philippines, Massie pointed out that Chinese is now the second-largest language represented in its databases.  He also pointedly commented that, although it has a global footprint, CAS nonetheless is “not chasing low labor rates.”

User centric. Massie quoted with considerable irony a comment made in 1994 by a previous CAS executive and Miles Conrad lecturer, Ron Dunn: that the “frustrating pursuit of the elusive end user” might never result in a profitable business for most NFAIS members.  Since then, however, CAS’ end user service, SciFinder, has been very successful (as a complement to the information-professional-oriented STN International).  The key to SciFinder’s success: it follows pathways that mirror the ways that chemical researchers work.  Thus (a theme to which Massie repeatedly returned), “it is possible to be closed / authoritative and still be surpassingly useful to a relevant market.”

Tech-driven, featuring virtual communities of techno-literate inhabitants. CAS, as a pioneer in the application of technology to publishing, has historically developed most of its own technology.  Does that make sense today? Massie commented ruefully that “customization can be a trap,” witness the pain experienced in adapting SAP to the CAS business.  “In the Web environment, it is essential to know the right level of investment in technology, and it is sector/content/market specific.”

Collaborative, open standards-driven, creating new content.  It turns out that from its beginnings in the 19^th century until 1966, CAS’ abstracts were written by volunteer abstractors – a robust early example of user-generated content.  True, Massie noted, today new standards for chemical information exchange are developing; open access repositories are growing; collaborative websites are emerging; and political/social pressures for more free access characterize the age.  “But do [these trends] have to be opposed? Or assimilated?” Massie noted in particular an article that appeared this month in Nature – “Chemistry for Everyone.”  In it, noted research Peter Murray-rust argues that CAS is “incompatible with the requirements of Web 2.0”; that “closed publications, binary software and toll-access databases are being swept away by emerging philosophies and approaches.”  But, Massie noted, universities are the Web 2.0 homeland, and SciFinder Scholar now serves over 1500 schools.  Not only that – many sites in  China have sprung up to provide information on how to break into the computer systems of major US universities in order to gain access to SciFinder.  So, clearly, “young people in China like SciFinder a lot.”

Massie asserted that the question of Web 2.0 vs. traditional publications is “not a binary problem.”   Rhetorically asking the conference attendees “can communities build content in your space?” he answered “It depends: How important is internal consistency?  Timeliness? What are the risks and costs associated with errors?  Can community add value that closed systems do not generate?”  The key for CAS is in balancing automation, authoritative expertise, AND social action.

He closed by noting some of mega-trends in chemical information.  The identification of chemical substances is still growing rapidly (there are now 33 million).  The number of published abstracts is growing apace, in linear fashion.  And the number of new chemical reactions identified, and chemical patents, is accelerating.  It may be that known chemistry still represents only about 1% of possible molecules.  Complicating the challenge of chemical information exchange is the trend toward patenting new compounds: since 1976 the percentage of new compounds in the CAS registry has increase from 14% to 63%.  “Someone has to do the job of systematizing that patent information.  Can it be done in a communitarian way?” Massie, a former McKinsey consultant, is too savvy to answer definitively.  But, while recognizing the importance of the “new order,” his message to conference attendees was not to underestimate the strength and persistent criticality of authoritative, systematically produced, and user-workflow-aligned content products and services.

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