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

Mon Mar 10 03:26:08 UTC 2008

On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 8:17 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 8, 2008 at 8:13 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
....
>  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.

Er, and I didn't actually look at the chemistry page to see what all
folks were proposing to do. As Ec & David Goodman and others have
said, CAS numbers are available from lots and lots of sources, so
simply reprinting the things -- rather than trying to get a lot of
them downloaded/validated through SciFinder -- doesn't seem too bad.
I'd be curious how things like the CRC handbook get them, actually. Do
they have to license their use from CAS?

-- phoebe