On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 8:13 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com 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."
The claim is that "CAS numbers are copyright CAS/ACS who have the legal right to regulate their use - as above." I find this idea highly dubious myself, though I wonder what countries it would legally fly in. Particularly given that "CAS identifiers have come to be accepted as a primary identifier system for chemistry."
Anyone here have informed legal commentary?
I don't have informed legal commentary, but my guess is -- and their actual comment bears this out -- that ACS's objections are due to the extremely stringent license requirements that one agrees to for when one subscribes to SciFinder. Basically, redistributing information from SciFinder/CAS Abstracts to other people who didn't subscribe (i.e. via Wikipedia, or otherwise) is almost certainly not kosher. I make this guess based on the rules that libraries agree to when they subscribe to SciFinder. There are nearly always specific provisions in the contract (not just for SciFinder, but for most databases and journals) that say who can get access to the data -- for instance, only the faculty, staff and students of a university. Obviously enough, the many glorious readers of Wikipedia are unlikely to fall into this faculty/staff/student classification.
Assuming this is true for most contracts they sign, then probably anyone systematically posting data from one of these systems is violating some provision of their contract. This doesn't have anything to do with copyright law per se, but it is a terms of use question.
The separate issue of CAS numbers being copyrighted is very unfortunate, but everyone is right that the CAS numbering and indexing and data organization scheme that is the core of SciFinder and related tools is very much the lifeblood of ACS, and they are afraid of losing it. Anecdotally, though the ACS is a nonprofit, they have historically not been inclined at all to go to open access/open licensing/open content schemes, unlike some other major publishers who are starting to see the wisdom of making information freely available. So I'm not sure that an appeal to their better nature would be terribly likely to work. But, it's always worth trying.
-- phoebe