The CAESAR and VEGA platforms have been produced from EC-funded research, and are therefore freely available for use.  The software can be downloaded. Furthermore, predicted values for more than four million chemicals will be made freely available.

The Danish Environmental Protection Agency has created and made available a database with predictions from more than 70 (Q)SAR models on endpoints for physico-chemical properties, fate, eco-toxicity, absorption, metabolism and toxicity.  More than half of all the estimates are for mammalian (human) toxicity endpoints and include commercial data sets from TOPKAT and MULTICASE as well as models developed in-house.  A structure set of about 166.000 discrete organic chemicals, including almost half of the (around) 100,000 EINECS substances, has been batched through the models, and the results are integrated in the database.  (EINECS: European INventory of Existing Commercial chemical Substances.)

The US Environmental Protection Agency made available a series of QSAR models, within the EPISuite and the T.E.S.T. platforms.

The EC funded ANTARES project is evaluating existing models which could be used for REACH, many of which are free to use.  Hundreds of possible models have been identified and listed, which theoretically could be used for tens of REACH endpoints.

The EU Joint Research Centre has promoted the availability of reliable computer-based estimation methods for use in the regulatory assessment of chemicals.  Within the JRC Institute for Health and Consumer Protection (IHCP), the European Chemicals Bureau (ECB) developed a range of freely available software.  One of the aims of the IHCP is to support the implementation of EU chemicals policy (including the safety assessment of industrial chemicals, chemicals in consumer products, pesticides and biocides) through the development, assessment and application of computational (in silico) methods. 

Typically in such QSAR models, the training set used to develop the model, the algorithm, and other aspects of the model are open for scrutiny by the regulator.   However, in commercially available software the full documentation of each model may not be available.  Indeed, the algorithm and the training set used to build the model are often confidential.  Despite this, the use of commercial programs has not been explicitly criticised by regulatory authorities.  In reality, commercial programs have been used in the USA and Europe, because of their ease of use, their availability and because they represent a major source of QSAR models.  We do not foresee restrictions in their use, and in our opinion it would be a pity to renounce these models.  However, it is likely that in the case of two similar models being available, one commercial and one freely available, the user will prefer the second one.  Within REACH, it also seems likely that the regulators will demand more transparency from the commercial models, and/or prefer the use of fully documented models.