"Dr. Wendy A. Warr" wrote:
We had a message from Wolf-Dietrich Ihlenfeldt in August about products from Molecular Arts Corporation that fail to acknowledge his group. Can anyone tell us if this latest offering is ethically acceptable?
As a matter of company policy, we make a good faith effort to contact all parties whose prior work contributed in any significant way to our commercial products. If the work is considered even remotely sublicensable and the author is willing, we arrange for same at our expense before letting our developers dig in. If the prior work is recently in the public domain or from recently published data, we still seek to secure permission for any attribution for same from those who are interested in doing so. In our view, the ethical problems of using prior works to lend unsubstantiated credence to new commercial development is of some significance. If there is no response, we assume that there is no interest in having us make an attribution and therefore we remain silent on that issue. In particular we do not make any quality assertions regarding that issue so as to avoid taking inadvertent credit for specific results. Believe me, I would much rather have products with a long list of referenced articles after them (and many of our products do). However, without such, our products can only stand or fall on their own. Lastly, we have not received any complaint from Dr. Ihlenfeldt either in public or private. Any complaint about our products receives my immediate attention. Did something slip by me? Apparently. We also have a designated company ethicist and we routinely cover these types of issues to make sure someone here doesn't get too far ahead of themselves. Now this is not to say we have covered all our bases, but we do honestly try. It makes no sense for us to upset any potential customer. If you are aware of a problem, please contact me offline or have the affected party get in touch with us so that we may resolve it quickly. Given the above, I would say our ethics are at least as good as those of someone who would question our ethics in public without having contacted us first. Sincerely, -- Phil Stevens Molecular Arts Chemistry and Safety Software for the Classroom, Lab, and Field ---------------------------------------------------------------- Molecular Arts Corporation | <phils@molecules.com> Hanover Corporate Centre, Suite 1000 | http://www.molecules.com 1532 East Katella Avenue | Main: (714) 634-8100 Anaheim, California 92805-6627 USA | FAX: (714) 634-1999 ---------------------------------------------------------------- -- Phil Stevens Molecular Arts Chemistry and Safety Software for the Classroom, Lab, and Field ---------------------------------------------------------------- Molecular Arts Corporation | <phils@molecules.com> Hanover Corporate Centre, Suite 1000 | http://www.molecules.com 1532 East Katella Avenue | Main: (714) 634-8100 Anaheim, California 92805-6627 USA | FAX: (714) 634-1999 ---------------------------------------------------------------- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)