Chemistry Central Blog
CAS agrees to cooperate with Wikipedia
In a positive turnaround Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) has announced that it will support the 'CAS Number Validation project' started at Wikipedia Chemistry to assist in producing a curated dataset.
"CAS, a division of the American Chemical Society... will contribute to the Wikipedia project... to help provide accurate CAS Registry Numbers for current substances listed in Wikiprojects-Chemicals... that are of widespread general public interest...". The statement goes on to say that "CAS views Wikipedia as an important societal tool for the general public, and this collaboration with Wikipedia is in line with CAS' mission as a Division of the American Chemical Society."
The declaration comes after CAS had earlier made clear its objection "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. We urge and expect those researchers to respect the explicit terms of the agreements they have entered into..."
CAS's agreement to
cooperate comes on the back of discussions with Martin Walker of WP:Chem and the ChemSpider
Advisory Group, in addition to much debate that ensued elsewhere.
The aim of the validation project is to address various concerns, which
include CAS numbers not matching the structure drawn in the Wikipedia's 'Chemical
Box' or 'Drug Box'. The import of CAS's cooperation was reiterated on the ChemSpider blog: "...there is general agreement by all participants at WP:Chem
that CAS Numbers have value... so the presence of a CAS number in the
[Wikipedia] boxes makes absolute sense and, of course, the correct CAS number
for the structure makes sense in an encyclopedia."
Posted by Gino D'Oca at 11:18 Comments (0)