Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Saturday, March 08, 2008

ACS blocks use of industry-standard chemical numbers in Wikipedia

Antony Williams reports that Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society, ACS) will  not allow the industry-standard but proprietary CAS Registry Numbers to organize the growing body of chemical information on Wikipedia.  Excerpt:

...A comment from Eric Shively at CAS can be found here online at Wikipedia. He comments:

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.  SciFinder and STN are provided to researchers under formal license agreements, under which the researchers agree to refrain from using these tools to build databases....

It’s an interesting stance. This at a time when there is more focus on facilitating information exchange. In an environment where people are using resources such as Wikipedia to source information one would assume that the availability of CAS numbers would actually be encouraged rather than so blatantly discouraged. It’s been said before that CAS numbers are like the phone numbers of the chemistry world....

Also see Peter Murray-Rust's first comment:

...Here the issue is that CAS identifiers have come to be accepted as a primary identifier system for chemistry - thus caffeine has the CAS number [58-08-2]....

CAS numbers are copyright CAS/ACS who have the legal right to regulate their use - as above. They would make excellent identifiers for the semantic web, except that they are closed. If I want to find out what [67-64-1] is I can only do this by paying CAS - about 6 USD for each lookup (e.g. on STN Easy). This immediately rules it out for any semantic web application which assumes that resolving links is free. Wikpedia tells me that this number corresponds to acetone (nail varnish remover) but they now do not have the freedom to do this....

An open system of identifiers would be highly valuable in developing the chemical semantic web and increasing quality. The closed and restrictive practices of CAS make it more difficult to create Web 2.0 applications in chemistry....

[Robert Massie, President of CAS] has already hinted that there is systematic stealing of CAS material. I do not condone this, but neither do I condone the closed control of a valuable system of identifiers....

And PMR's second comment:

Wikipedia has between 1000 and 2000 chemical substances (ca 0.01% of the total number of substances in CAS)....

The American Chemical Society - hitherto a respected learned society - is now telling a voluntary community of scholars that it forbids them to check their facts. It is preventing them disseminating chemistry.

I wonder if there is anything in the history of learned societies that matches this action....There are so many positive things they could have done.

As it is they have done the following:

  • re-asserted their position that they care for revenue more than supporting the wider chemical community
  • re-advertised themselves as one of the least progressive learned societies
  • alienated a growing number of young scientists who look to the Web as a critical part of the future of chemistry...

The use of CAS numbers has been abandoned by organisations such as PubChem for exactly this reason. PubChem now has nearly 20 million substances....It’s highly respected (although ACS lobbied the US government to limit Pubchem’s activities). It is part of the NIH and now - with the NIH mandate - effectively safe from the ACS. It provides a credible alternative.

We (including Wikipedia) should now switch from using CAS numbers to using PubChem IDs wherever possible....

Update.  Also see Glyn Moody's comment, The World's Leading Anti-Scientific Society.

Update.  Also see the follow-up posts from Cameron Neylon and Antony Williams on the specific problem of shifting from the closed CAS numbers to some open alternative.