IP qy: JCR

[David Goodman <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU>]

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