David Gerard wrote:
http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=997
They have a specific hate-on for Wikipedia:
"Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) objects to anyone encouraging the use of SciFinder - and STN - to curate third-party databases or chemical substance collections, including the one found in Wikipedia."
By an interesting coincidence, just this morning I've been working on my own little database of CAS numbers. You won't find, anywhere on the net, a nice little tab-delimited file of chemical information containing columns for name, formula, CAS number, etc., precisely because of this CAS claim on the copyright of their numbers. I was wondering how long it'd be until CAS complained about Wikipedia.
Whether they're non-profit or not, CAS acts precisely as jealous of its set of numbers as any other commercial database company. The impression I get is that this *is* a significant nuisance for chemists and other scientists. Other entities (I can probably find the details) have attempted to establish their own, freer sets of unique identifiers for chemical compounds, precisely in hopes of avoiding the cumbersome restrictions placed on the use of CAS numbers. But CAS has sued -- and I think successfully -- to discourage this, claiming either that they own the idea of a single master database of unique identifiers for chemical compounds, or that having a competing set of identifiers would sow confusion.
Whatever the legality of the situation, I'm betting Wikipedia isn't the first information service to have incurred CAS's wrath. We can certainly learn from the experiences of others. For example, here's a set of URLs I collected a little while ago which permit free web-based lookup, by name or CAS number, of information about chemicals, including their CAS numbers:
http://www.emolecules.com/ http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npg/ http://www.inchem.org/documents/icsc http://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ http://chemfinder.cambridgesoft.com/
I get the impression that CAS is grudgingly tolerant of services which allow one-at-a-time, interactive lookup of chemicals, but what they're adamant about is that no one create a simple database of chemicals using the CAS number as a primary or secondary key. Wikipedia isn't quite one of those, of course, but you could do a decent job of creating one by writing a script to go through every article in [[:Category:Chemical compounds]] and extract the relevant information from the {{Chembox}} at the top -- precisely as I've currently got a script in the background doing.
I work with a guy who used to work at CambridgeSoft; on Monday I'll ask him what he knows about the CAS situation.