I can understand the annoyance that is raised w/r to the industrial cost
for ICSD. My pet peeve (as a former industrial chemist) was the cost for
the Cambridge Crystal Structure Database, where academic users could get
it for some small amount (<$500 for a site license as I recall) and
industrial users pay a huge amount (~$30,000/year ?). My department
could not afford it, so we used the library and typed in coordinates.
The argument for this pricing is that industry (particularly for CSD,
the pharmochem community) uses this data to make money, while academic
users are the producers of the data in the database. There is clearly a
problem with this one-price-fits-all scheme for industry, but I wonder
if the people complaining will change their price for their
products/services for a customer who can't afford more, if they feel
that it will impair their ability to collect full price from the
customers that can afford the fee.
In the case of ICSD, the US industrial cost is ~$8000 for the 1st year
and then ~$4000/year for subsequent years. This is for a site license.
There may be a discount for site licenses for academic and non-profits,
but I know we at NIST pay close to full price. True, there is a low
price for *individual* academic users -- for the DOS version only, and
if you want 10 professors/students to have copies, pay 10 times. So this
is not a 90% discount. Unlike all of the other crystallographic
databases, you can pay to search ICSD database without buying it; ICSD
is available as part of the STN service (www.cas.org). I wish that that
were true of the rest. So at least in this case, they are not "locking
up" the data and forcing one to buy it just to get occasional access.
As for the copyright issue. One can copyright a collection of
information even if the all the components of the collection are public
domain. The collection, for example a volume of poetry, becomes more
than just the sum of the contents -- the selection of what items to
include and their order matter. As such, the ICSD is a
copyright-protected collection. You may be able to access any of the
data inside the ICSD in a library, but that does not allow you to make
copies of large sections of the database and give them away. I would not
think any commercial scientist would want the intellectual property they
create to be pirated either.
Personally, I would like to see the databases become much cheaper for
both industrial and academic users, but for that to happen academic use
needs to become more mainstream and perhaps the argument needs to be
made with the database suppliers (not me) that their commercial pricing
needs to be restructured. So the next time someone writes a message "can
anyone tell me about..." I would like the reply to be "There are XXX
entries in the ICSD database, you should get a copy or search it on STN.
Failing that, here is a literature reference to get you started ...". I
can see the occasional exception for the scientist in a less affluent
country, but ironically they seem to be able to afford ICSD. In my
experience, the vast majority of the requests seem to come from students
at large US universities.
Brian
Karsten Winter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> This is where the crunch lies. I am, for example, a private NON-academic
> crystallographer... and there is no allowance for people like me. We can
> only buy the "Industry-version" for 10,000 DM (~5,800 US$).
> And frankly: I do not have the pocket money to buy it... people in
> academic institutions seem to forget that there is a world outside their
> protected space.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> Can anybody explain to me the factor of 10 difference in price for ICSD data
> between academic and industrial users. Is there a rational explanation or a
> formula which makes an industrial dollar buy only 10cents when shopping at
> ICSD? I know of discounts given to academic users for commercial software
> which is of the order of 30 to 50%. But to give merchandise away at 90%
> discount to one group of people and charge another group the full price
> (whatever it may be), I have a problem with that. This, by the way, is the
> reason why there are so many requests these days - the market reacts to such
> humbug.
>
> L. Keller
> CAMET Research, Inc.
> Goleta, CA
