People are strange…
Why on earth they continue drinking free fresh water while there are 100%
reliable, certified, perfectly copyrighted, protected by an army of attorneys
and reasonably priced beverages such as Coca Cola for instance?!

--- In sdpd@yahoogroups.com, Armel Le Bail <armel.le_bail@...> wrote:
>
> 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. "
>