Elsevier Gingerly Opens Papers to Text Mining
February 25, 2014
Even organizations not known for their adaptability can change, but don’t expect it to be rapid when it happens. Nature announces, “Elsevier Opens Its Papers to Text-Mining.” Researchers have been feeling stymied for years by the sluggish, case-by-case process through which academic publishers considered requests to computationally pull information from published papers. Now that the technical barriers to processing such requests are being remedied (at Elsevier now and expected at other publishers soon), some say the legal restrictions being placed on text mining are too severe. Reporter Richard Van Noorden writes:
“Under the arrangements, announced on 26 January at the American Library Association conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, researchers at academic institutions can use Elsevier’s online interface (API) to batch-download documents in computer-readable XML format. Elsevier has chosen to provisionally limit researchers to 10,000 articles per week. These can be freely mined — so long as the researchers, or their institutions, sign a legal agreement. The deal includes conditions: for instance, that researchers may publish the products of their text-mining work only under a licence that restricts use to non-commercial purposes, can include only snippets (of up to 200 characters) of the original text, and must include links to original content.”
Others are concerned not that the terms are too restrictive, but that there are any terms at all. The article goes on:
“But some researchers feel that a dangerous precedent is being set. They argue that publishers wrongly characterize text-mining as an activity that requires extra rights to be granted by licence from a copyright holder, and they feel that computational reading should require no more permission than human reading. ‘The right to read is the right to mine,’ says Ross Mounce of the University of Bath, UK, who is using content-mining to construct maps of species’ evolutionary relationships.”
Not to be left out of the discussion, governments are making their own policies. The U.K. will soon make text mining for non-commercial use exempt from copyright, so any content a Brit has paid for they will have the right to mine. Amid concerns about stifled research, the European Commission is also looking into the issue.
Meanwhile, some have already made the most of Elsevier’s new terms. For example, the European consortium the Human Brain Project is using it to work through technical issues in their project: the pursuit of a supercomputer that recreates everything we know about the human brain.
Cynthia Murrell, February 25, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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