gistfile1.txt

Dear sir, madam,

I am a volunteer contributor to the free and open-source Citation Style Language (CSL) project. Many reference managers such as Zotero, Mendeley, and Papers use CSL, allowing scientists like myself to quickly and easily cite papers in their manuscripts in the correct citation style.

One feature we would like to offer are sets of journal abbreviations, such as that of CASSI. This would save authors even more time, since they no longer would have to check the journal abbreviation of each cited journal by hand. However, it seems like your terms of service forbid scraping and redistribution of CASSI abbreviations. http://cassi.cas.org/guidelines.jsp says "You are prohibited from using automated programs for systematic retrieval of CASSI content to create or compile, directly or indirectly, a collection, compilation, database, or directory."

May I ask for your reasons for having these rather restrictive terms of use? I think it would be in the interest of your ACS members if the CASSI abbreviations would be available as a public resource.

I would appreciate hearing your thoughts on this topic.

Yours sincerely,

Rintze Zelle, PhD