Terms of use of mychem.info service

[iainmwallace]

Hi,

Really awesome service and concept.

I noticed the 'non-commercial' use flag on mychem.info that isn't present on mygene.info. Could you comment/blog on why the difference? Is there was any way (perhaps an endpoint with limited datasets, or an alternative service) that it could be used in a commercial environment? I understand that there is a vast difference in the history of licensing between biology and chemistry data - As I am sure you are aware, non-commercial licenses cause a lot of complications for integration efforts.

Thanks,

Iain

[newgene]

@iainmwallace The reason for mychem.info's NC flag (at least for now) is because some of the data sources from mychem.info is under NC license (e.g. Drugbank is on CC-BY-NC).

The model we want to go with is to label each source with their license, so that we can lift the overall NC restriction for MyChem.info and let users to use the data sources based their individual license requirements. Here is an example:

http://mychem.info/v1/drug/ZRALSGWEFCBTJO-UHFFFAOYSA-N

If you look at each top-level fields (data sources like drugbank, chebi etc), under that, there is always a "_license" key pointing to the actual data source license page.

But we need to get OK from each data source with this model, and we are in the process of that. Before we get the consent from data sources, we will keep the NC flag for MyChem.info.

[iainmwallace]

Awesome, that makes perfect sense.

In addition to the link to the license it would be great if you could add an extra field that explicitly states if a source is CC or CC-BY-NC etc. For example, it isn't clear that DrugBank is CC-BY-NC from http://mychem.info/v1/drug/ZRALSGWEFCBTJO-UHFFFAOYSA-N

[sirloon]

@iainmwallace you may also want to use /metadata endpoint, http://mychem.info/metadata, which also contains information about licenses in more details (as well as other useful data such as versions, counts, etc...). This is for instance the entry for drugbank from /metadata:

"drugbank": {
"license": "CC BY-NC 4.0",
"license_url": "https://www.drugbank.ca/releases/latest",
"license_url_short": "http://bit.ly/2PSfZTD",
"stats": {
"drugbank": 11290
},
"url": "http://www.drugbank.ca",
"version": "5.1.1"
},

[iainmwallace]

Ah, that clarifies it. Thanks!