Is it legal to crawl research papers from ACM/IEEE?

Question

I am working on a project that need me to grab lot of research papers abstracts, titles, authors and display it on a web site of my own.

I chose to get list of research papers from DBLP and then crawl respective web sites to get the paper abstracts, titles and authors.

My question is, is it legal to just have these abstracts on my own website? If not, will be legal to show the copyright of IEEE/ACM under the abstract in my website?

UPDATE: Any ideas like, how do sites like http://academic.odysci.com/ do it?

Answer 1

From the ACM terms of usage page

To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Send written requests for republication to ACM Publications, Copyright & Permissions at the address above or fax +1 (212) 869-0481 or email [email protected].

Thus, I believe that you shall contact with them before doing anything else. Also, without looking for the copyrights on IEEE, something similar probably would be the case.

Answer 2

If you are affiliated with an academic institution that subscribes to IEEE/ACM material, talk to your library. They may be able to negotiate access on your behalf. Chances are fair it isn't the first such request they've heard.

Answer 3

I looked up the IEEE case:

Guests/Members are not permitted to do the following:

create an archive of any portion of CSDL;

use robots or intelligent agents to access, search and/or systematically download any portion of CSDL;

So not looking good for your project.

But, if your project has merit, each group may be open to something. I highly doubt that they will let you host titles and abstracts, though. Maybe you should try PLOS ONE.