Publishers prioritize “self-plagiarism” policing over allowing new discoveries | Alex Holcombe's blog

lterrat's bookmarks 2017-07-13

Summary:

"Text mining the scientific literature could yield thousands of discoveries, about both fraud and new connections between molecules, genes, and diseases, but it can’t be done when publishers like Elsevier own the content and are trying to monetize it all for themselves (https://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2017/07/11/text-and-data-mining-overview). 'Self-plagiarism' also puts publishers at legal risk as a result of them publishing all our articles under restrictive copyright – it can be a copyright violation for them to publish text that happens to be identical to an earlier paper by the same author that happens to have been published by a different publisher. In an email from a publisher to Professor Peter Tse, the issue was framed as protecting the author but there was also this sentence: 'Another issue to be borne in mind is the matter of copyright in extensive text duplication.'

Thus the traditional system of publishers owning the copyright to our work is both preventing new discoveries (which has to wait until the publishers find a way to use text mining to maintain or increase their profits) and creating ridiculous busywork for ourselves."

Link:

https://alexholcombe.wordpress.com/2017/07/12/publishers-prioritize-self-plagiarism-detection-over-allowing-new-discoveries/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » lterrat's bookmarks

Tags:

oa.libre

Date tagged:

07/13/2017, 15:00

Date published:

07/13/2017, 11:00