[WikiEN-l] CAS Discourages Using SciFinder to Help Curate Wikipedia

[Philip Sandifer]

On Mar 8, 2008, at 10:56 AM, David Gerard wrote:
>
> ACS is a non-profit. This won't help their egregious claim.

I've now consulted with Teh Wife. The following interesting facts come  
to light.

1) CAS numbers are not widely used in academic papers. They're largely  
used in commercial applications - catalog descriptions and industrial  
specifications.

2) Patent descriptions, apparently, would always use the CAS numbers.  
Which does seem significant, since the point of a patent description  
is to be publicly available.

3) CAS is friggin' expensive to get access to, in no small part  
because it is expensive for them to produce. Article reading for CAS  
is, at this point, a PhD-requiring job. Which is part of their  
protectivism regarding it, no doubt.

IANAL, so I'm not about to interpret any of these fascinating tidbits,  
though it does suggest that the straightforward scholarly non-profit  
source using another scholarly non-profit source argument might be a  
little weaker than it had initially seemed, given that CAS numbers  
seem to be used primarily in industrial settings.

-Phil