Are the COD Advisory Board members prepared to a legal
action against them ?

This reviewers comment received aftre the COD paper
submission is a closing speech for prosecution :

Integral text...

"As a summary of the history and current status of the COD, this paper
deserves publication in J. Appl. Cryst., but since it does have some
polemic aspects, perhaps it should appear in a database issue with papers
from the established databases. The paper should be very useful - but not
in ways the authors intend. On publication, it will be very valuable to
attorneys for the established databases. Directive 96/9/EC of the European
Parliament, and its implementation in national legislation, provide very
strong intellectual property protection for databases, and this paper (and
the web records of the COD) should provide ample justification for legal
action against the creators of the COD and shutdown of the COD. The
Editors need to decide whether they want to become involved in such disputes.

The COD is sold to the community on false pretenses. Once errors must be
corrected, changes must be tracked, there is a central repository, there
are maintainers and developers, data needs to be keyed in by hand,
duplicates are flagged and reviewed manually, entries are re-validated and
adjusted, and web mirrors are developed, real costs are incurred - and
these costs need to be paid by someone. Ensuring that data published in
the COD persists as long as needed into the future also requires real expenses.

All organizations have learned that it is increasingly difficult to get
volunteers for anything. The history of all the database organizations is
that they began as small groups of volunteers, who realized that the task
was too big for volunteers, and that organizations were needed to ensure
curation and permanence. If the current COD volunteers are working on
their own time, that is fine, but if they are "borrowing" time funded for
other purposes, they are stealing somebody's tax dollars! The paper as it
stands in unacceptable for publication. Statements about where the money
comes from now and in the future are necessary. There is no reason to
contribute to the COD if there is doubt about its permanence.

The authors do not make a case why they are wasting worldwide
crystallographic resources in duplicating effort already done. (Never mind
the insanity of 3+ organizations - FIZ, Toth, MPDS, and ICDD - abstracting
the same inorganic structural data!) The existing databases serve the
community well, and at a very low price. The authors will admit that the
track records of governments at supporting scientific infrastructure of any
sort (and especially buried resources such as databases) are very poor. I
have no confidence that any government will fund crystallographic databases
properly, and believe that a user-pays model is much better in the long
term. The fact that the PDB is "free" is an accident of history; the
vision to create it came from a US national laboratory, and funding at a
marginal level has continued since then. Academics (especially European
academics) seem to believe that information is free, and exhibit an
appalling ignorance of economics, and where their own resources come from.

Statements that the existing databases are "too expensive" are simply
nonsense. The databases are supplied to academics at very low prices, and
in many countries there are national licenses, so the users actually think
of them as free! An experimentalist who needs them has at least $250,000
worth of instrumentation, so the plea that they cannot earn a few hundred
dollars to license a database is disingenuous, at best. The existing
database organizations have made arrangements for developing countries, so
such countries need to work with the database organizations. Anyone who
claims that teaching institutes cannot afford the fees of the usual
databases has clearly never contacted the database organizations. All of
them I know will make their databases available for teaching use free of
charge. The authors simply make too many incorrect statements to let this
paper be published at it stands.

The ranges used to scan for duplicates (0.5 Ĺ on cell constants and 1.2° on
angles) are far too broad, and eliminate a great deal of potential utility
of the COD.

Reference(s) should be provided for the morphology program(s) written at
Portland State, and for the partial databases of modulated and magnetic
structures. I additional to demonstrating little knowledge of economics
and the law, the authors do not exhibit enough professional courtesy in
their citations of existing work and resources.

The authors claim in the Conclusions to have demonstrated that an
alternative open access database is feasible. My verdict is "not proven".
Now for the really picky bits... There are several incorrect uses of
"it's". It is not correct to talk of a "CIF file"; CIF is Crystallographic
Information File. "