This week the news got out the Chemical Abstract Service updated their CAS Common Chemistry website to now have almost half a million records from their databases online under an open CC-BY-NC 4.0 license. This is what it looks like:
This is a big step for the American Chemical Society, that is making more and more steps into Open Science (they joined Open Citations not too long ago too). I do have to say, the "ACS simplifies open science, so researchers can focus on research" claim on their ACS Open Science website is a bit exaggerated :/ But that's what you get when prestige trumps scientific quality, and they stand in the shadows of some other big publishers, of course.
Back to the CAS registry numbers, the total number of CAS registry numbers is well over 150 million, so half a million is not that much. But Open Science is not black and white, and this is an awesome contribution allowing, for example, Wikipedia and Wikidata to be curated, an effort we have started now.
The website has an API allowing to retrieve information in an automatic way, and I personally expect that the website will improve of the coming months. My personal wishes include BioSchemas annotation on this website.
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