copyright open-source-software
Can I embed &quot;public available&quot; scientific data in my app?
<p>I have written some (smallish) scientific apps which I would like to make public (open source). They use scientific data sets from NIST such as <a href="https://www.nist.gov/pml/atomic-weights-and-isotopic-compositions-relative-atomic-masses" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this</a>.
It would make sense to add a (slightly cleaned up) copy of the data set to my code. I plan to reference the source in comments and in the readme. Suppose an alternative would be to download the data every run from NIST - but as programmer I would really dislike this approach.</p>
<p>Being tiny hobby projects I don't want to employ a lawyer, so into how much risk am I getting?
Are there best practices that I should follow?</p>
<p>I tried researching on my own - but I somehow couldn't find any reasonable resource. There are some tools around that I suppose get their data from this source (e.g. chemical suites that calculate molecular mass) - but I can't find out how and if they got rights for the data. Consider <a href="https://www.sisweb.com/mstools/isotope.htm" rel="nofollow noreferrer">sisweb</a> - it does very similar calculations but I can't find anything about the data they use. On the other hand I notice that NIST themselves don't include any citations to the researchers that contributed to the table.</p>

<p>The underlying data is a set of established scientific facts, roughly {1, H, 1, 1.007 825 032 23(9), 0.999 885(70), 1.007 84, 1.008 11, D, 2, 2.014, 101, 778, 12(12), 0.000 115(70), T, 3, 3.016, 049, 2779(24)}, {…}… That data is presented in a form which might be protected by US copyright (if it's not a &quot;government work&quot;), but the data itself is unprotected, whether or not you use it in a free app or a paid app. The legal distinction is between that which is created, and that which is discovered. There is a valid scientific perspective that data is created, but that is not how the courts see the matter. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co." rel="nofollow noreferrer">Feist</a> is, in the US, the controlling decision. It is possible in some other jurisdictions that there are laws that would prohibit using factual data taken a database without permission, but not in the US.</p>
