... The data come - according to the authors - from a snapshot of the [Chemical Abstracts Service] registry in 2007. I believe the following to be facts, and offer to stand corrected by CAS: ...
CAS sells a licence to academia (Scifinder) to query their databse . This does not allow re-use of the query results. Many institutions cannot afford the price.
There are strict conditions of use. I do not know what they are in detail but I am 100% certain that I cannot download and use a signifcant part of the database for research, and publish the results. Therefore I cannot - under any circumstances attempt to replicate the work. If I attempted I would expect to receive legal threats or worse. Certainly the University would be debarred from using CAS.
The results of the paper - such as they are - depend completely on selection of the data. ...
There are many data sources which are unique - satellite, climate, astronomical, etc. The curators of those work very hard to provide universal access. Here, by contrast, we have a situation where the only people who can work with a dataset are the people we pay to give us driblets of the data at extremely high prices. ...
But to use a monopoly to do unrefereeable bad science is not worthy of a learned society.
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 3/17/2009 05:31:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
