Fair use rights to conduct text and data mining and use artificial intelligence tools are essential for UC research and teaching - Office of Scholarly Communication

"The UC Libraries strive to preserve fair use rights when licensing electronic resources—including the fair use rights to conduct computational research and incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) tools in academic studies and scholarship. 

Academic scholars like those on our campuses use licensed content for computational research, sometimes referred to as text and data mining, or TDM. As the electronic resource licensing landscape has evolved, there has been a concerning rise in publishers’ attempts to restrict fair uses, particularly for TDM and any use of AI tools in the process. Fair use restrictions on computational research and AI usage have deleterious effect: they curtail freedom of inquiry, exacerbate bias in research questions and methodologies, and amplify the views of an unrepresentative set of creators given the limited types of materials otherwise available with which to conduct research studies. Such restrictions can also disadvantage UC researchers relative to colleagues in more than forty other countries where publishers are prohibited from using contracts to nullify exceptions to copyright for research.

In this blog post, we explain more about why and how the UC Libraries work to deter fair use restrictions in license agreement negotiations, and to protect UC scholars’ ability to make curiosity-driven and cutting-edge discoveries that further the pursuit of knowledge...."