petermr's blog

Readers of this blog will have seen many posts where I (and by proxy Mike Taylor and others) highlight the unacceptable practices of Elsevier when publishing Gold Open Access. The facts appear to be undisputed – Elsevier is mis-labelling and thereby misselling articles which author have paid for.
My only avenue of contact has been Elsevier’s “Director of Universal Access”.  I have alerted the Director to my concerns and the response has been minimal – assurances that Elsevier have been putting things right and flippant comments such as “Good things take time”. I have yet to be convinced that the Director has any power beyond trying to play down issues and there is no indication that Elsevier take the problem seriously at a high level.
I have therefore written to my MP (and thence to David Willetts – this is the way it is done). Julian and I know each other well – he researches on DNA quadriplexes.  I sincerely hope he and David can redress the balance from the corporate to the public good.
 
Dear Julian,
APPARENT MISSELLING OF GOLD OPEN-ACCESS BY ELSEVIER
I am writing to alert you to the unacceptable quality of Elsevier’s paid Open Access products. I ask you to take this forward and to bring this to the attention of David Willetts and UK research funders. I know you and he are very familiar with Open Access and omit the background.
In essence Elsevier have been selling Gold Open Access and Hybrid Gold Open Access and failing to deliver what the authors/funders paid for. This has happened over a period of two years, and although Elsevier have been alerted many times by individuals they continue to do it.
The evidence is anecdotal but I believe the practice is widespread. Mike Taylor (honorary researcher at Bristol) first announced the
problem two years ago (http://svpow.com). Seven months ago the practice was endemic in Elsevier journals and I have documented many independent problems on my blog (http://www.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr). I summarise here, but can collate the examples if required.
The problem takes several forms:

• Elsevier take money for an OpenAccess article and put it behind a paywall, thereby requiring the citizens of the world to pay to read Open Access.

• Elsevier claim IP rights over the article. Most funders require CC-BY or similar licences with no handover of rights. I find ubiquitous statements such as “(C) Elsevier” or “All rights reserved” which are presumably in breach of the contract that Elsevier and the authors signed. I believe that Elsevier may be breaking both contract law and copyright law.

• Elsevier state that permissions can (often should) be obtained through the Copyright Clearance Centre (Righstlink). In some cases the  website is so constructed that it effectively convinces readers that Elsevier owns the downstream rights of the article and that all re-use permissions must go through Rightslink. I would compare this closely to other recent misselling of products. It is easy for a reader to pay many thousands of pounds for “permissions” which they do not need to buy.

As our information is anecdotal and only Elsevier knows the details I cannot judge the scale of the problem. I noted 7 months ago that when Elsevier announced new Gold OA journals all of them had severe failings. When I asked Elsevier for a list of Hybrid Open Access papers in their journals they were unable to give it to me.
I am not imputing motive in this letter (it could be incompetence, indifference, or deliberate mislabelling).  However I strongly believe that Elsevier has obtained and is continuing to obtain revenue that they are not entitled to and which they should return to both authors and readers/re-users. I leave it to you as to whether further punitive action is possible and appropriate.
There is a wider cost than the monetary one. By providing mislabeled and mis-sold products Elsevier’s practice has devalued Gold Open Access. As the largest publisher their practice may suggest to other publishers that they need not take care and attention. The opportunity cost is large – readers will not have read articles to which they are entitled and, deterred by the Rightslink cost, will have failed to re-use materials. Authors may have been held to account by funders for “failing” to publish Open Access when it was Elsevier’s fault. It causes delay and waste in scholar’s research.
Elsevier (through their “Director of Universal Access”) have effectively acknowledged fault in messages left on my and Mike Taylor’s
blogs. They state that they are rectifying problems and that this will take “some months”.  They ask us to be patient with the flippant comment “Good things take time”. I regard this as completely unacceptable – a corporation should give a formal believable high-level response to a major problem.
I believe the primary cause is because the scholarly publishing industry is unregulated at any level. Your government is putting many
millions into Open Access with no controls on the quality of the product.
As you are a professional bioscientist and author I will leave it to you as to how you take this forward. My suggestions would be that David Willetts should:

• write to the board of Elsevier and demand a full public account of what has happened
• require them to provide a full audit of every paid Open Access paper.
• require them to identify individuals and organisations who have been mis-sold by Elsevier and to appropriately refund their payments.
• consider how to build a regulatory process for paid Open Access.

I hope you will forward this to UK government funding bodies such as RCUK. I shall separately copy Robert Kiley (Wellcome Trust).
Best wishes
Peter
[PS I shall shortly be sending you a separate mail on Content Mining – please keep the issues separate.]

 
TWO YEARS ago Mike Taylor publicised that Elsevier were illegally charging for paid open access. Here’s his shocking analysis a few days ago
The Illegality is no longer in doubt. Charles Oppenheim is highly experienced and agrees that Elsevier are acting illegally. We do not impute motive – you can decide whether it’s

• incompetence
• lack of care (indifference)
• deliberate (which could be criminal)

SEVEN MONTHS ago I re-raised this issue in great detail. Elsevier’s director of Universal Access (Alicia Wise) replied to my blog but otherwise the company has made no public comment or taken any formal action. We have only AW’s vaguest assurance on my blog that anything was happening.
Note that Elsevier probably get a few thousand paid Open Access papers a year. When I asked AW for a list she said she wouldn’t/couldn’t make it public. That’s either

• incompetence
• indifference
• deliberate obstruction

Last week I showed continued massive breach of copyright and contract by Elsevier – both illegal. When This was put to AW she replied flippantly “Good things take time” – i.e. Elsevier were not taking this seriously enough to issue a public statement.
There is real anger among funders and authors. Scientists have been taken to task by funders for non-compliance, when it’s all Elsevier’s fault.
Charles Oppenheim and I suggested immediate action.
NOTE: The original article I used in this article as an example was not, in fact, Open Access so here’ s a verifiable anecdote (I have permission from the authors) )to replace it.]
A colleague wrote in 2012-nov:

We have recently published a review [in an Elsevier journal] and have had a large amount of requests for the pdfs over the last few days as the article was only just listed on Pubmed rather than just the journal website. This was quite strange as we had selected the Open Access option as we are funded by the Wellcome Trust. Needless to say Elsevier had not made the article open access and were charging for access (32 USD/ day) Once I informed my boss he was absolutely fuming and wrote to them basically calling them a ‘bunch of *****.’ What is most disappointing as this is the second time this as happened with this same article. Once it was accepted a few months ago and listed on the journal website, Elsevier did not have it listed as open access and were still trying to charge for it. We had to contact them to inform them that it should be open access and it was not acceptable considering they charged us 3500 USD.

Since this was a personal acquaintance it seems likely that wider mis-selling has happened. What is particularly clear is that even when serious errors are pointed out Elsevier fails to fix them.
So is it fixed now? Well it’s STILL stamped (C) Elsevier and “All rights reserved”. And here’s the Rightslink – (C) Elsevier [a breach of copyright] and charging for permission to reuse. And look at the prices??? FORTY Quid for 1 reprint.

 
I no longer believe in AW’s “urgency” and “commitment”. Why should I? TWO YEARS of illegality is unacceptable.
So tomorrow I’ll tell you what I’ve done.
 
 
 

AMI is learning how to interpret scientific diagrams. She’s done a lot of text, and vector graphics – now she is moving to images. There’s no simple solution – we have to try a lot of different approaches. Here she is trying to see if letters and number can be recognised by breaking down into straight lines (segmentation).   Here’s a typical subset of the image – it might be a (not very good) TWO.

 
AMI calls up her helper Skippy who has brought her troop of young programmers. They’re not very well disciplined, but Skippy will keep them in order. They divide up the project:

• AMI tells Skippy WHAT to do and in what ORDER. That’s called an ALGORITHM. I’ve asked her to try thehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramer–Douglas–Peucker_algorithm. It sounds hairy but actually it’s very easy – as long as you have Skippy to keep the roos in order. Here Skippy tells the roos they each have to sit on one pixel for the whole time.(This algorithm is so simple that most of the time the roos just have to keep quiet.
• AMI has brought along Ralphy bear who will keep a record (MEMORY (technically a STACK))
• 
• The first and last roos (note each roo has a number (ID)) create a straight line between them. Is this good enough ? We ask Jimmy bear to decide – he’s got a measuring tape and he finds the roo who is farthest from the line. Number 4 is way out – above the limit.
• 
• So now we have to make two straight lines:

 
Now we’ve got  two separate problems 0-4 and 4-12. They’e completely separate and we can tackle each independently. If we don’t keep good track we’ll be in trouble (that’s why we need Ralphy). And if we don’t do things in the right order we’ll also be in trouble (that’s why we need Skippy).
So we’ll divide 0-4 into 0-2 and 2-4 (roos 5-12 are getting bored and Skippy has to bring them to order)
We’ve done 0-2 (#1 is close enough to the line. Here we do 2-4. Is #3 close enough? Bear says yes…

So we go on to 4-12. (“0-3 can go and play cricket” says AMI -“They’ve done their bit”.

 
But #9 is way out of line. We’ll need to split the lines again.
 

 
and now all the roos are close enough to the line.
We’ve split the diagram into 5 lines. This algorithm is widely used for geographical objects such as maps. It’s really valuable to segment them as we can then compute areas, work out which countries touch, etc. We’ll be using it for chemistry and phylogenetic trees and diagrams in general.
You might think the roos had very little to do. But we’ll see examples in the future where each roo needs a measure of independence. They may need to know who their neighbours are, for example. Or whether they have been used. This is Kangaroo-Oriented Computing (KOC).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollard’s_kangaroo_algorithm

I have received a reply from Alicia Wise of Elsevier to my assertion that Elsevier was   asserting copyright and charging readers illegally

Hi Peter,
As noted in the comment thread to your blog back in August we are improving the clarity of our OA license labelling (eg on ScienceDirect) and metadata feeds (eg to Rightslink). This is work in progress and should be completed by summer. I am working with the internal team to get a more clear understanding of the detailed plan and key milestones, and will tweet about these in due course.
With kind wishes,
Alicia
Dr Alicia Wise
Director of Access and Policy
Elsevier
@wisealic

I replied

Thank you for your reply.

You therefore confirm that Elsevier will for several more months despite being alerted to the possible illegality

* continue to assert rights over CC-BY work

* will continue to ask Rightslink to collect money for “permissions” which it has no right to

* require re-users to “request permissions” when it has no authority to do so.

I would suspect that this is a prima facie breach of trading regulations.

It seems clear that Elsevier knows its actions are wrong and doesn’t care. NOTE THAT DURING THIS TIME ELSEVIER WILL CONTINUE TO COLLECT MONEY TO WHICH IT HAS NO RIGHT. My suggestion to funders , universities (on behalf or authors and readers) is take legal action against Elsevier for various breaches of contract.

There has been considerable twitterage this morning but silence from Elsevier… My guess so far is that thousands of authors have been seriously disadvantaged by Elsevier’s action. They may well have fallen foul of their funding body. They may be distressed that people are “required” to pay Elsevier for what they thought was a freely re-usable article. Meanwhile I assume that all the funds obtained by Rightslink are being distributed between them and Elsevier. Will any of the purchasers be offered their money back? I am supported by knowledgeable commenters in my claim that Elsevier’s action is immoral , unethical and probably illegal. Charles Oppenheim (a distinguished expert in this area) writes in a comment.

MIKE TAYLOR IS CORRECT. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ states that no further legal terms may be applied to a CC BY licence that in any way restrict third party use of materials. My reading of it all is as follows: author paid money to have the item licensed under CC BY. Elsevier is in breach of that agreement. Author is now entitled to claim breach of contract by Elsevier, and to put item up themselves somewhere under CC BY terms. Author is also entitled to contact Elsevier and insist all restrictions on use are removed. Finally, author can sue Elsevier for damages – the cost of the OA licence plus all subsequent costs. My question is as follows: has anyone contacted the author? Is the author aware of what has been done?

The twitter commentary generally agreed that Elsevier was in legal breach of the contract with the author. There is no question that Elsevier through Rightslink are asserting ownership and copyright. I read Elsevier’s “Molecular phylogenetic and Evolution” – or rather my machines do. Here’s a typical paper http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1055790314000049 It’s All-rights reserved as well as CC-NC in the HTML version. When we go to Rightslink as a student writing a dissertation we get:
you are REQUIRED to get Elsevier’s permission. This appears to be a legal statement which Elsevier has no right to make. And here is a specifically non-commercial company (whatever that is – trading is a commercial activity);

You are REQUIRED to have Elsevier review your request.

AMI is learning to extract numbers and paths from images. It’s hard work and requires a lot of heuristics. Here’s her first shot (from BMC Evolutionary Biology DOI:1471-2148-14-20-
 expanded:

(I’ll select a phylo tree soon). At present we’re just concentrating on the horizontal numbers. (The vertical ones just need turning through PI/2). So we are just after the “6.00”, and “MAD”, etc.
Here’s what AMI gets:

 
The black is the original pixels (binarized) and the small characters are AMI’s interpretation. She’s essentially got them right (there are a few she doesn’t yet). She thinks the top ones are most likely to be “O”, but “0” and “O” are very similar and we’ll have to use heuristics to decide.
There’s a lot more, of course. It doesn’t worry AMI as she has the emotional apparatus of a FORTRAN compiler. But PMR is feeling we are starting to crack this problem. And next time we’ll do lines. I have to have some of this in place before I visit Ross and Matt on Friday.

SEVEN MONTHS ago I showed that Elsevier “open access” CC-BY papers were incompetently labelled (see /pmr/2013/08/12/elsevier-charges-to-read-openaccess-articles/ and following blog posts), and under “Rights and Permissions” charging huge amounts of money.
THEY ARE STILL DOING IT. Here’s an Open Access CC-BY article labeled as “All rights reserved” and where you ask permissions they charge 8000 GBP for 100 reprints.
That’s right
EIGHTY QUID for 1 REPRINT.
Why doesn’t someone take them to the Trading Standards Office?  They are getting money for something they have no right to. They are IMO breaking the contracts with the authors, who have paid thousands of pounds to have the CC-BY licence added.
It’s IMMORAL, UNETHICAL and my guess is ILLEGAL.
NOTE: Various commenters have suggested that Elsevier is allowed to charge for CC-BY articles. That is legally true. What they are NOT allowed to do is:

• print “Copyright Elsevier” over the RightsLink page. CC-BY does NOT allow Elsevier to claim copyright over the article and my guess is that this could be upheld in court.
• write “This service provides permission for reuse only.” in the Rightslink
  

  rent this contentpurchase this contentorder reprintsorder reprints (with translations by Elsevier)order reprints (with translations by customer)order e-printsreuse in a book/textbookreuse in a journal/magazinereuse in a presentation/slide kitreuse in promotional materials/pamphletreuse in CME Materialsreuse in a thesis/dissertationreuse in coursepack/classroom materialsreuse in a CD-ROM/DVDreuse in a newspaper/newslettermake photocopiesreuse in conference proceedingsreuse in a government reportreuse in training materialspost on a websitereuse in a posterreuse in a TV programme/documentary/moviereuse in a mobile applicationreuse in a manner not listed here

  This service provides permission for reuse only.

This is a highly misleading phrase. It is clear that the payment is for “permission” to re use the material.  It is very close to demanding a monopoly on access to the material.
I also believe that if one has paid for “CC-BY” to have “Elsevier – all rights reserved ” stamped over the product is to provide seriously substandard goods. Remember that the authors may have paid 3000 USD simply to have the CC-BY added to the article and to have the paywall removed. They are not getting what the thought they had paid for.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027737911400050X
 

 
There is NO indication of rights in this document, other than “All rights reserved” as shown here. “Open Access” is legally meaningless.
 
 

 
So the only way to find the rights is to follow:

 
to  (https://s100.copyright.com/AppDispatchServlet?publisherName=ELS&contentID=S027737911400050X&orderBeanReset=true)
 

Magnified…

Where we see “Copyright (C) 2014 Elsevier” and “This service provides permission for reuse only”. 

All you are buying (albeit for huge amounts) is PERMISSION. Permission which is not Elsevier’s to give.
This is why it is morally, ethically and probably legally unacceptable. Elsevier have asserted copyright over a document that the have no right to. They know they are doing it – I highlighted it seven months ago in great detail. They continue to do it. I find that unacceptable and I expect everyone outside Elsevier to find the same. No doubt Elsevier representatives will tell us how hard they are working to solve the problem. That they take this very seriously. But they continue to charge for PERMISSION — something that they have no right to charge for.
So, I assume they are making money by means where they have no legal basis to do so. I shall not impute motive, but since they know they are doing it they are culpable in my eyes.
If they were an airline their planes would have been grounded. They’ve had seven months to take action. A simple solution would be to supplement “Open Access” with “CC-BY” and disable the link to Rightslink. It would take minutes to alter the code. This would ensure that readers knew immediately what the status of the document is. Yes, they might lose some of their “CC-NC” revenue, but at the moment it’s the readers who are losing money.
 
and the PDF http://ac.els-cdn.com/S027737911400050X/1-s2.0-S027737911400050X-main.pdf?_tid=10e06096-a7bd-11e3-a28e-00000aacb361&acdnat=1394391802_bc08d388bcbaad313aad19f39fad62a8 which shows that it’s labelled CC-BY.

I got this wonderful message from Ed Saperia earlier this week:

I am fortunate enough to be programming the featured speakers for Wikipedia’s annual conference Wikimania, which is coming to London for the first time ever. The themes of the conference are I think close to your heart; Open Data, Open Scholarship, The Future of Education, Free Culture and Social Machines (aka Virtual Communities). Other speakers include Rufus Pollock, Clay Shirky and Cameron Neylon, to name a few. We expect to have the core of the Wikimedian community, as well as educators, technologists, academics, librarians, and anyone else who considers themselves part of the knowledge industry.

I’d be very pleased to programme you as a featured speaker. You’ll have a 30 or 60 minute slot – your choice – in front of 2000 delegates and be livestreamed to many more internationally. The event is from the 6-10th August at The Barbican Centre, and you’ll be speaking on the 8th, 9th or 10th.

This is fantastic. Wikipedia is one of the great and lasting achievements of this century and typifies the Digital Enlightenment. It epitomises so much – cooperation, democracy, meritocracy, innovation, challenge to authority. It represents the dream of the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. [Note – I’m using “Wikipedia” to include Wikimedia, Wikispecies , Wikidata, etc.]
Note, I’ve used Wikipedia to reference these people and their creation. They are massive. You should read the pages.
I have. I now use Wikipedia as my primary source for much  of my knowledge. 
What??? an academic relies on Wikipedia? Sacrilege! Disaster! You should use your library. You should buy textbooks. You should sweat to get your knowledge. Wikipedia isn’t written by academics but common people. It must be rubbish.
This was an almost universal reaction from academia when Wikipedia started. Lecturers banned students from using it and required them to read out-of-date textbooks instead. Only a few academics embraced the ideas. Here was the infrastructure for the Digital Enlightenment (I don’t know whether this phrase is in common use, but it should be).
What’s the Enlightenment? Why is it in Capitals?
Let’s look in Wikipedia. (We know it’s rubbish, but it might give us a tip).  The Age of Enlightenment.

The Age of Enlightenment (or simply the Enlightenment or Age of Reason) was a cultural movement of intellectuals beginning in late 17th- and 18th-century Europe emphasizing reason and individualism rather than tradition.^[1] Its purpose was to reform society using reason, to challenge ideas grounded in tradition and faith, and to advance knowledge through the scientific method. It promoted scientific thought, skepticism, and intellectual interchange.^[2] The Enlightenment was a revolution in human thought. This new way of thinking was that rational thought begins with clearly stated principles, uses correct logic to arrive at conclusions, tests the conclusions against evidence, and then revises the principles in the light of the evidence.

and this applies equally to Wikipedia. When the cultural history of this century is written (the pre-Singularity bit, at least, if machines value history) Wikipedia will have the same place as the Encyclopédie . I’m pleased that I’m on record as supporting Wikipedia – See John McNaughton, The Observer [newspaper] 5th April 2009. When asked whether I trusted Wikipedia I replied:

“The bit of Wikipedia that I wrote is correct”

Now, of course that is immensely and unacceptably arrogant in the Wikipedia community and I only used the phrase to shock the complacency of academics. In Wikipedia there is no “I” but only “we”. There is no “correct” but only “as good as our energy and resources can make it at the present time”. After all most pages start as single sentences. The article on Diderot has been revised 500 times in the last 4 years. None of those is final – all are as good as possible.
In science Wikipedia is massive. Huge amounts of species, compounds, theorems, physics, stars, … up to date and in many cases pretty comprehensive. And where it’s too massive there are links  to authoritative resources. What’s not so known is the growth of complementary resources:

• Wikimedia Commons
• Wikidata
• Wikispecies

I wonder where I can find out about them?
I shan’t know what I am going to say till I stand up in front of the Wikimanians. It depends on what I do tomorrow – NO! what WE do tomorrow. August is web-years away. I’m hoping I can put demos in front of US. Get US involved in changing the world.
At the start of the Digital Enlightenment.
 
 
 

I love Milvus milvus. (The image from the Wikipedia article CC-BY-SA))

A beautiful bird – extinct in UK in England (sic) when I grew up – we travelled to a remote part of Wales in the hope of seeing them. Now happily flourishing e.g. circling on the north of the M40 from London-Oxford. Unfortunately I can’t stop as this would cause a car crash.
So when I saw there was an Open Access article blurbed by Taylor and Francis on twitter as “open access” I went to look. And found
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00063657.2014.885491
Which contains the text – my emphasis:

I’m casting around for significant questions that could best be answered by content-mining the current and historical scientific literature. It’s rather like an astronomer saying: “we’ve built a better telescope; now, what shall we point it at?”. We’re developing a “contentscope” – the ability to ask any Factually based question on the current scholarly content – whether Open or Closed.
BTW you can’t do this with Google or other search engines. The queries have to be based on scientific concepts. If you are asking for “cats” in Google you’ll get the musical “Cats”, LOLCats “I can has Cheezburger?”, and masses of acronyms. Look at Wikipedia:

Science, medicine and technology[edit] [12 items for CAT, I understand 3]

• …
• Catalase, an enzyme
• Chloramphenicol acetyltransferase, an enzyme
• Computed axial tomography or CAT scan, a medical imaging X-ray technology
• …

and that doesn’t include genes called “cat”, the 3-letter oligonucleotide “CAT”, the tripeptide CAT (cysteinyl-alanyl-threonine) and many more.  So we have to use The Content Mine + AMI.
So here’s my question:
“Do secondary metabolites show the same process of evolution as organisms and their genes?”
I have no ideas whether this has been already answered. I wouldn’t know how or where to look. I’ll explain.
Organisms manufacture thousands of chemicals for a wide range of purposes. Primary metabolites are ” metabolites that [are] directly involved in normal growth, development, and reproduction.” Typical examples are glucose, ATP, carbon dioxide, whereas Secondary metabolites are

“… organic compounds that are not directly involved in the normal growth, development, or reproduction of an organism.^[1] Unlike primary metabolites, absence of secondary metabolites does not result in immediate death, but rather in long-term impairment of the organism’s survivability, fecundity, or aesthetics, or perhaps in no significant change at all. Secondary metabolites are often restricted to a narrow set of species within a phylogenetic group.^[2] Secondary metabolites often play an important role in plant defense against herbivory^[3] and other interspecies defenses.^[4]Humans use secondary metabolites as medicines, flavorings, and recreational drugs.

Examples are caffeine, penicillin, thymol, geraniol. There are hundreds of thousands – plants are particularly versatile. Insects use them for communication (pheromones) to signal between individuals and groups. Plants use the to kill or deter predators. The evolutionary pressure must be considerable – if you give off a chemical signal that allows you to find a mate kilometres away (like the Gypsy Moth) you will reproduce better. If your odour can be detected by a predator then you may be in danger; conversely smelling predators is an escape strategy.
For the last 30 years I have been working in chemical similarity – here’s an example from Open Access J.Cheminf (BMC, http://www.jcheminf.com/content/4/1/28 ) – I am on the editorial board – and this is from the Pubchem group.

 
Here’s a simple example of similarity between chemicals. The methods are complex, but the result is essentially the same sort of tree that we use to classify species.
So maybe we can correlate exact species and its pheromones. The closer the species, the closer the pheromones. It’s easy to cluster species – go to Genbank and extract the sequences and compute the alignment and the differences…
.. and chemicals? What we want is a list of species and their associated pheromones. Some of that will be in Chemical Abstracts – no idea how much. So just write to the American Chemical Society and ask if you can download and use Chemical Abstracts for free and republish the results…
No. In any case it’s better to use the primary literature. So we can search for all papers than contain chemical compounds and also contain species. Here’s an example about the Gypsy Moth (Lymantria dispar) and its pheromone (which can be used to lure it into a trap). http://www.pnas.org/content/100/3/809.full  (free but not Open). One compound is “18-methyl-nonadecanoic acid” – you don’t know what that is? Just go to http://opsin.ch.cam.ac.uk and type in in and you get:

How similar is this to other insect pheromones? We can now start to extract the raw data from the literature LEGALLY and we have a whole new tool to answer research questions. (The question isn’t “theoretical” – insect and other arthropods do vast amounts of good and vast amounts of harm and understanding their evolution and chemistry is essential).
So we’d like your help. In communal projects you don’t have to be an expert in everything.