Realising the innovative potential of digital research methods: a call from the research community.
abernard102@gmail.com 2014-07-03
Summary:
Use the link to access the full text statement and list of signatories. "On behalf of research community stakeholders, we are calling on Elsevier to withdraw its current policy on text and data mining (TDM). TDM is a digital research method which enables the analysis of vast and heterogeneous types of content. It has led to new medical and scientific discoveries and is set to be key to increasing the productivity of research and become an established element of research methodologies.
Europe is falling behind in the exploitation of TDM because the lack of clarity in the current European copyright framework is disincentivising the uptake of TDM by researchers. In the UK, an exception for TDM has been introduced into legislation. What this means is that TDM will no longer be an activity that is subject to licence in the UK; any researcher will be free to mine content to which their institution has legal access. We see no reason that researchers across Europe and beyond should not have equal rights to mine content to which they have legal access. Restrictive licences provided by publishers for access to content for the purpose of TDM have the potential to further disadvantage the research community by enforcing strict parameters around how content can be mined and under what conditions the results may be made available.
We have strong reservations1 about whether the updated Elsevier TDM policy2, released on January 31st 2014, will meet the needs of researchers over the long term. The API that Elsevier is offering to access content can be a useful tool for developers, but limiting this service to only text will force researchers to continue to negotiate one-to-one licences for access to the full content (images, figures, etc.). Also, explicitly preventing direct crawling of content disregards the most
common method of performing TDM. What is more, we believe that, because it places conditions on how TDM outputs may be made available, the policy will have a negative impact on the dissemination and transparency of research results. We call on Elsevier to abandon this policy and adapt their licence terms and conditions which will set a positive example that other publishers may follow in order to ..."