For more than a decade now we are developing the enzyme and metabolic information system BRENDA. Since 1998 it is available as an INTERNET resource to the scientific community and it is heavily used with several thousand queries per day. We will continue the scientific development of the database and are always grateful about comments to improve its quality and usefulness.
Most of the money for the development of the database has come from public sources so far. Unfortunately these sources are no longer available for the further BASIC funding, i.e. the daily business of extracting information from the primary literature. This reflects the general policy of the European and German government not to fund scientific infrastructure longer than a certain period of time. As we are dedicated to continue this service we decided to keep the service free for academic community whereas use by commercial users (presently ca. 30% of the web queries) now requires a license.
Initially we had planned to keep the webpage open relying on the fairness of our commercial users. Unfortunately the experiences of the distributor of BRENDA has shown so far that many companies are unwilling to buy the (legally required) license as long as their scientists can access our service on the internet. Therefore we stopped the commercial use of the BRENDA webpage without a license.
We have tried to find a solution that hampers the normal academic use of BRENDA as little as possible. If you find that our present solution creates any problems please send an e-mail to
Dietmar Schomburg
Academic Use of BRENDA is free - Commercial Use requires a license - See copyright notice
webmaster: s.placzek@tu-braunschweig.de