All scop commercial licences are on the basis of an annual fee. Since scop is not a one-off product, but a database service that must be updated continuously, it is hoped that the money raised from commercial sources in this way will help offset the costs of maintaining this service and keeping the classification up to date.
All commercial users are allowed a period of 2 weeks free access to evaluate the database, however after this a licence must be obtained. Note that access to scop is recorded.
Licensing scop allows access to the database only. It should be emphasised that structural classification provided in scop, is by its very nature partly subjective. The scop authors cannot offer advise on interpretation of the data in scop although they will attempt to assist if there are problems with accessing the database. Although every effort will be made to keep the database up to date and avoid errors, no responsibility can be accepted for any errors that may occur. The full licence agreement can be found here.
Because of slow access speeds through firewalls and the patent problems associated in using the scop sequence similarity search service for proprietory sequences, companies can also licence a full copy of scop that can be installed on an in-house WWW server. The computing requirements for such an in-house server are given here.
Companies that have large in-house structure determination programs, may also be interested in customised versions of scop to include their own experimental structures and/or models in the classification for integrated, easy access. Any company interested in discussing this possibility should mail scop.