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Researchers Pull Out of Talks With Publishers On Text-Mining
ananyo writes "Disagreement between scientists and publishers has grown on a thorny issue: how to make it easier for computer programs to extract facts and data from online research papers. On 22 May, researchers, librarians and others pulled out of European Commission talks on how to encourage the techniques, known as text mining and data mining. The withdrawal has effectively ended the contentious discussions, although a formal abandonment can be decided only after a commission review in July. Scientists have chafed for years at limitations on computer-aided research. They would like to use computer programs to crawl over thousands or millions of articles and other online research content, extracting data to build up databases or to pick out patterns such as associations between genes and diseases. But in many parts of the world, including Europe (though perhaps not in the U.S. — the situation is unclear), this sort of use currently requires permission from the content's copyright owner. Even if an institution has paid to access a journal, its academics do not necessarily have permission to mine the text."
Text and data mining have a long term history in the media, back to 80s.
Some vids are available on Youtube. European Agencies are ahead of Us based ones :
Text mining
Data mining
...professionals are starting to take notice.
The "we're just replacing menial labor, so now those people are freed up to do more valuable knowledge-driven work" argument doesn't work so well when it's the knowledge driven work itself that is being co-opted.
It's the researchers' work, their livelihood. That Google (replace with Big Data Corp. of your preference) can get very rich short-term by vacuuming up the mental effort of the planet and slapping ads onto it, does not mean it is a viable economic model for the rest of us.
The researchers are protesting that they are not being allowed to mine the content that they have already paid to get. They are not arguing that the content should be available for free.
The people who do the science and write the papers produce the content. Yet somehow the publisher controls how it gets used thereafter.
Everyone is so damned beholden to copyright that it more or less constrains how you do anything.
And they wonder why people are pushing for open access -- it's time to cut the buggy whip makers out of the equation.
If you took public money to do this, it should be open. If you want it to be locked down and proprietary, don't publish.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Many US universities already subscribe to services that do exactly this - usually through the school's library.
#DeleteChrome
Even if an institution has paid to access a journal, its academics do not necessarily have permission to mine the text.
Translation: Invent the wheel many many times! Don't you DARE share the data on wheels with others without first getting permission to replicate data from the spoke makers, and rim makers!
Fuck off AC. Look at the internet as a model on how unfettered data proliferation prevents biases from dominating information use. (What's that barbara striesand? That pictue of your beach house is STILL on the internet? Fancy that!) Allowing researchers to share and vet each of these databases you want them to all make independently is EXACTLY how this technology should be used, BECAUSE it prevents usedful data from being hushed up, or forgotten, and gives that data its due. The scientists that created the data want the data shared. The scientists that ewant the data, want it shared.
The only group that does NOT want the data shared, is the publishing industry, because if the data leaves their grimy little fingers, they can't charge rent.
That's the real issue here.
Buy the content you want to index, put in in a database and search it at your leisure.
What? You want it for free? Get a life.
From the summary: "Even if an institution has paid to access a journal, its academics do not necessarily have permission to mine the text."
I thought copyright only concerned the rights to distribute and make copies of an original work. Since when did "distribution" and "making copies" get extended to what you can do with what you have obtained legally?
Knowledge mining does not extract content. Knowledge mining extracts facts. Text mining analyzes and classifies documents, clusters them into groups, and tries to support further knowledge mining. About the only activity that I can think of that could qualify as potentially violating copyright is summarizing. Content may be protected by copyright laws, but the facts can't, and your comment isn't therefore very relevant. I really wonder how the publishers argue that copyright applies to this. Where I live (.cz), copyright not only explicitly applies to making copies; in fact, I believe there's a clause explicitly allowing using "using the work in scientific research", if the use of parts of the text "doesn't exceed the extent necessary for the intended goal". One could argue that mining facts, entities, and their relationships qualifies under this, and that it expressly doesn't qualify as making copies of a work perceived as an authored text.
Ezekiel 23:20
Pulling out is not an effective method of prevention.
You're scientists. Just do it. Facts are facts. They aren't subject to extortion schemes like copyright.
Don't ask publishers ahead of time. It will put bad ideas in their head. Conduct your research, then let them prove that that you need their permission later. Not the other way around.
I really wonder how the publishers argue that copyright applies to this.
You have to enter into a contract to be given access, the terms of that contract certainly prohibit downloading the entire database. Just ask Aaron Swartz if he understands that yet.
You are ignorant of how scientific publishing works. The publishers are the free loaders. Scientists did the research, wrote the papers, edited and peer reviewed them on a volunteer basis and, indeed, typeset the final print versions.
The large scientific publishers are parasites who abuse their oligopoly powers to extract rents on the labor of the scientist.
.: Semper Absurda
As an NLP Bioinformatics guy, I believe the real crime Aaron Swartz committed was being in the news.
He isn't the first to have that dataset and he wont be the last.
We write papers using massive NLP scans of publications rather routinely.
Most of the time, the papers are downloaded from PubMed (public funded) so they can't even complain about bandwidth costs, etc.
For anyone who didn't know already, most subscription Publishers don't **DO** anything.
They are only slightly better than patent trolls, and in some cases, worse.
academic culture and the academic generation gap.
Hiring and tenure still involve large percentages of faculty that "came up" under the old system, and don't see the problem (don't have time to see the problem) that has emerged in academic publishing culture over the last couple of decades in particular. They don't see work published outside of the big name journals/publishers as "serious" or "academic" for the moment. So young academics wanting to build a career continue to support them and publish in them, as a pragmatic career-building move.
But young academics by and large (at least in my wing of the social sciences) are incredibly jaded about academic publishing and are absolutely willing to shift the culture away from publishing with big journal mills—they just have to get hired, get tenure, and become "the academics of the world" first. Then, as they begin to be the ones making the hiring and tenure decisions, you can bet that as they consider the next crop of youngsters, they won't place the same premium on Springer, Elsevier, et. al. journals.
The publishing mills are not long for the world, and they know it, which is why they're all trying to expand/reshape their product lines, business models, etc. away from straight print content licensing and toward academic SaaS and other similar offerings.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
One of the concerns (read: lame excuses) given by the publisher side of this is fear that large scale downloads will cripple their web servers. Private torrent trackers for scientific work is the obvious solution. With university and institutional seeds, this solution would be efficient, equitable and fast.
.: Semper Absurda
Come on. The description of research methods , procedures, tests and results scientific papers, exists for the betterment of humankind, not to make people who own it rich. Get rich by Making Stuff, not exerting a monopolist's control on Knowledge.
How hard is this? All research and results conducted by higher ed should be available for free and the costs rolled into the tax base.
This is as basic as it gets. Roads bridges security and advances in knowledge.
You have to enter into a contract to be given access, the terms of that contract certainly prohibit downloading the entire database. Just ask Aaron Swartz if he understands that yet.
It's my understanding that for me as a physical person, the law of my country voids any such contract clauses in the copyright law explicitly - meaning that doing so *could* be construed as violating terms of contract but it would never pass as copyright infringement (and yes, there's been a ruling of our Supreme Court on that, so there's hardly any wiggle room here).
Ezekiel 23:20
It is done look at dunblincore, OAI, and duraspace for opensource solutions
So the discussion concerns:
Publishers who block Content
Data miners doing research.
At least that's clear then.