The Royal Society of Chemistry and Wikipedia just released an interesting press release:

“The Royal Society of Chemistry has announced that it is donating 100 “RSC Gold” accounts – the complete portfolio of their journals and databases – to be used by Wikipedia editors who write about chemistry. The partnership is part of a wider collaboration between the Society’s members and staff, Wikimedia UK and the Wikimedia community. The collaboration is working to improve the coverage of chemistry-related topics on Wikipedia and its sister projects.”

This leaves me with a lot of questions. I asked these in a comment awaiting moderation:

Can you elaborate on the conditions? Is it limited to wikipedia.org or does it extend to other Wikimedia projects, like Wikidata? Does the agreement allow manual lookup of information only, or does it allow text mining on the literature as well as on the database? How should I put this in perspective with the UK law that allows text mining, and, in particular, can UK Wikipedia editors use text mining anyway, or is that restricted? Is there an overview of the details of what is allowed and not allowed, or a list of restrictions otherwise?

Details on how to apply to access can be found here.

This post was originally posted as https://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/2015/01/royal-society-of-chemistry-grants.html.