Free for all (students)
Accelrys makes SciTegic Pipeline Pilot Student Edition free to academic researchers
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SAN DIEGO-In a move that is gaining speed among providers of analytical software for the life sciences, Accelrys announced in mid-November the launch of SciTegic Pipeline Pilot Student Edition software, as a free, stand-alone version of its scientific operating platform. The intent is to allow academic researchers to create their own protocols or components for use with Pipeline Pilot which can then be shared with the scientific community at large via Accelrys's Web site.
"We have put together a library on our Web site that allows any user to post tools they develop for use with Pipeline Pilot," says Ton van Daelen, director, platform technologies for Accelrys. "This will help with the emanation of the technology throughout our entire user base."
Via this method, users can gain broader access to the different ways researchers in academia are using the software and the type of work they are doing. One researcher may be working in the ADME/tox area and post work he has done to customize Pipeline Pilot for his research. A second researcher conducting similar work can then gain access to it, try it out and see if is providing good results.
The benefits to the community may not stop there, however. "We have an interest in finding out which of these are really good and which ones researchers find valuable," von Daelen says. "There is always the opportunity for us to commercialize the applications. We have a history of making scientific findings available to all our users and having the royalty go back to the partner who created it."
The stand-alone version of the student edition is designed to be installed on a PC, as opposed to the commercial version of the software which has broader applicability across the enterprise.
"The release of SciTegic Pipeline Pilot Student Edition to the academic community will be a boon for cheminformatics and bioinformatics research," says David Wild, assistant professor and associate director of cheminformatics, Indiana University in a press release. "Accelrys' scientific operating platform has revolutionized the way that scientific computing gets done in the pharmaceutical industry, and I believe it can have a similar effect in academia."
