I am still wondering if ‘a publisher collection’ of chemistry articles (or PubChem) are not violating the CAS policy, already? The future and text mining will show … if this is indeed the case.

Again, I also appreciate the efforts of CAS, but please link to other sources. Anyway, on the long-term I am still in favor of InChIs, they are not perfect, but they are the best we have right now, for breaking down chemistry data silo barriers.

As for the copyright (“licensing”) on the data, CAS’s position does not seem to have changed. CAS claims copyright on CAS Registry Numbers®, but will let you use, “without a license and without paying a fee”, up to 10,000 of them “in a catalog, website, or other product for which there is no charge”. Their Information Use Policies were updated on December 12, 2008, but I find no major changes to the points of contention from this time last year.

Let’s be very clear about this: there is no copyright on information per se. Nobody can stop me telling you that the boiling point of water is 100 ºC, or 212 ºF, or that the CAS Registry Number® is [7732-18-5] (as can now be confirmed from CAS’s own site). On the other hand, there can be a copyright on collections of information. So you are free to reproduce an entry or two from the commonchemistry.org site, but you would need to be very careful before reproducing the entire database.

The major change, as Antony says, is the change in attitude. This time last year, CAS was issues thinly veiled threats to withdraw access to CAS databases from Wikipedia editors who used them to verify WP’s information; the response was a quite open threat of legal action against CAS under European competition law. At least now, both sides are co-operating for the benefit of the general public, which is of course Wikipedia’s main userbase.

http://zusammen.metamolecular.com/2009/03/31/sixty-four-free-chemistry-databases-part-6-common-chemistry-from-chemical-abstracts-service

Honestly, I see no added value at all, beside getting a CAS number, I do not care about, because it can not be used for linking to other data silos. Not only are they not mentioning InChI, but also that ChemSpider was a leading member of the Wikipedia initiative, so, kudos for the chemistry 2.0 community, surely not for CAS, now following what we already created a long-time ago (in web standard time).

I keep searching Google or ChemSpider directly, which gives me more information, also for the compounds with less than 1000 publications ! Anyway, I appreciate the effort and wish CAS a dramatic Alexa traffic increase from others, I will not come back to that site, if it stays like that.

For real usefulness they will need to provide more associated links/sources of the data.

This presents a bit of a paradox for them as to do so would undermine SciFinder (though not to do so would be a helping hand to free access services which link out to data sources – such as ChemSpider and Google Scholar in the long run)