I ask for an anonymous friend:
Many journals list their latest JCR Impact Factor on their
sites.
This is obviously a fair use, even for commercial purposes,
as it
is one data point out of 6,000/year. (Or do they perhaps do
it
with specific permission from Thomson?)
My friend runs a university departmental blog in her
biomedical
subject, and she wants to manually collect from the
journals'
home pages the IFs for the top 10 journals in perhaps a
dozen
fields, and place them on her blog. She plans to format them
differently, not using the JCR abbreviations, give lesser
precison as she finds it on the sites, and not do multi-year
trends or further analysis, which is a major part of the
value in
JCR.
It would seem to meet the usual tests: it's for educational
use,
it's only 2% of the material, it is not really an adequate
substitute for JCR: people without access to JCR might use
her
numbers, but it is hard to imagine an institution that would
otherwise buy JCR using these numbers instead.
Is it legitimate fair use?
And, btw, would it be fair use to compute the 8 year impact
factor, from ISI data but which ISI does not include in JCR,
and
post that, for some or all journals?
David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
previously:
Bibliographer and Research Librarian
|