THANK YOU ELSEVIER!

Dear Peter Murray-Rust

Thanks for your email.  Data is not copyrighted.  If you are reusing the

entire presentation of the data, then you have to seek permission,

otherwise, you can use the data without seeking our permission.

Yours sincerely

Jennifer Jones

Rights Assistant

Global Rights Department

Elsevier Ltd

PO Box 800

Oxford OX5 1GB

UK

Tel: + 44 (1) 865 843830

Fax: +44 (1) 865 853333

email: j.jones@elsevier.com

Elsevier is pleased to announce our partnership with Copyright Clearance

Center’s Rightslink service. As from 6 July, Rightslink will handle

Elsevier’s journal permission requests.  With Rightslink (r) it’s faster

and easier than ever before to obtain permission to use and republish

material from Elsevier. Using Rightslink is as simple as:

Simply visit: http://www.sciencedirect.com/ and locate your desired

content.

Click on Permissions within the table of contents or in the tool-box to

the right of the online article to open the following page:

1. Select the way you would like to reuse the content

2. Create an account if you haven’t already

3. Accept the terms and conditions and you’re done

Please contact Rightslink Customer Care with any questions or comments

concerning this service: Copyright Clearance Center Rightslink Customer

Care Tel (toll free): 877/622-5543 Tel: 978/777-9929

E-mail: customercare@copyright.com

Web: http://www.rightslink.com

Elsevier Limited, a company registered in England and Wales with company

number 1982084, whose registered office is The Boulevard, Langford Lane,

Kidlington, Oxford, OX5 1GB, United Kingdom.

—–Original Message—–

From: peter murray-rust [mailto:pm286@cam.ac.uk]

Sent: 22 July 2007 11:19

To: Rights and Permissions (ELS)

Subject: Permission to extract crystallographic data robotically from

Elsevier publications

Dear Claire Truter,

I and colleagues have built a repository of crystallographic information

published in scientific journals. This data is factual, and not

copyrighted by the original authors. Major publishers such as the

International Union of Crystallography and the Royal Society of

Chemistry encourage (and often demand) the publication of such data as

part of the scientific record and mount it on their sites as “supporting

information” or “supplemental data”. It is of extremely high quality and

over the last 30 years the crystallographic and chemical community have

shown that it is an essential resource for data-driven science – a

concept with the NSF and JISC among other see as a large part of future

science.

We have built robots which have analysed over 50, 000 papers on

publishers’ sites and extracted the crystallography. Note that the major

publishers I have referred to do NOT require a subscription to access

this information. We have agreed protocols whereby our robots run at

times and frequencies that do not cause denial of service

(DOS) – i.e. we try to be responsible.

Elsevier journals do not expose this as public supplemental information

but I believe it is available to toll-access subscribers.I would like

permission to extract crystallographic data from any Elsevier journals

using robotic techniques and to make the TRANSFORMED extracted data

public under  a CC-BY licence (Creative

Commons) or an OpenData license from the Open Knowledge Foundation .

All data so extracted would be referenced through the DOI of the article

thus allowing any user (human or robot) to give full citation and

therefore credit to the authors and the journal.

To help the discussion we note that facts, per se, are not copyrightable

and that the authors do not claim copyright. The data are almost always

direct output from an instrument. We need not store the actual documents

(normally retrieved as IUCr CIF files) as our derived work is a

value-added document in XML-CML which retains none of the creative work

of formatting and pagination in the original.

I am sure you will agree that this is a reasonable request and that

Elsevier as a major scientific publisher would wish to do whatever it

could to foster the birth of a new science.

I am guessing that Elsevier journals (e.g. Tetrahedron, Polyhedron,

etc.) contain a total of ca 20,000 relevant papers – until we are able

to examine them robotically I can’t be more precise. Obviously I cannot

write for permission for each paper individually so I am asking for

general permission to carry out  robotic extraction of crystallographic

data from all Elsevier journals to which I have access through my

institution. And I would obviously agree to devising a robotic protocol

that was friendly to your web server.

If you and colleagues wish to be convinced of the value and quality of

this cyberscience please have a look at

http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/crystaleye where you can see the aggregated

material from the other publishers. Although we haven’t published the

results formally yet, two graduate students have carried out thousands

of days’ work of theoretical calculations on the data which we believe

have led to new insights into crystal and molecular structure.

I hope that Elsevier will be excited by the new vision and that we can

move rapidly towards extracting this data. Note that the robots operate

on a daily basis and provide news feeds to the community about new

exciting derived data.

Note that this is a public request – I have explained the reasons on my

blog (http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust?/p=432) in which this

letter is contained. Since this is a matter of considerable current

public interest I request permission to post your replies – if there is

material that you wish to remain confidential please send a separate

mail to me indicating confidentiality which I will honour.

Peter Murray-Rust

Unilever Centre for Molecular Sciences Informatics University of

Cambridge, Lensfield Road,  Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK

+44-1223-763069

This email is from Elsevier Limited, a company registered in England and Wales with company number 1982084,

whose registered office is The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford, OX5 1GB, United Kingdom.

This is clear, simple, and in line with what I and others currently believe. If we find crystal structures in Elsevier journals as supplemental data our robots will extract them to http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/crystaleye

I am very pleased to be able to post a constructive response from a publisher. This  blog tries to be fair and only gets upset at restrictive practices – from whatever type of organization.