Tensions grow as data-mining discussions fall apart : Nature News & Comment

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, 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. Publishers, worried that their content might be redistributed for free, tend to block data-mining programs, giving extra licence permissions only on a slow, case-by-case basis (see Nature 483,134–135; 2012). And although authors can now choose to publish under licences that explicitly allow text mining, that innovation doesn’t help text-miners wanting to run programs on decades of pre-existing content.  Rather than struggle through a thicket of different permissions set by publishers, some researchers want Europe to exempt text mining from copyright law — allowing them to run programs on content that they have paid for, and on free content, without fear of copyright breach. Last year, the UK government said that it plans to introduce exemptions for non-commercial purposes. Lenient ‘fair use’ rights in the United States may already allow text mining, depending on how the law is interpreted.  'There is an intense debate on this within the scientific and research community, with a large number of scientists pointing at the limits of the current copyright regulatory regime,' says Ryan Heath, a spokesman for European Commission vice-president Neelie Kroes. 'This is a very serious issue, impacting on scientific excellence and innovation in Europe.' To tackle the issue, last December the commission set up a working group — one of a number under a framework called Licences for Europe — to open discussions about new policies among publishers, researchers, librarians and other interested parties, such as technology companies. In late February, researchers complained in a letter to the commission that the group was constrained to discuss only text-mining licences, and not changes to copyright law (see Nature 495, 295; 2013) — a restriction that would 'make computer-based research in many instances impossible'.  'Every researcher I’ve spoken to thinks licensing is a problem,' says Susan Reilly, projects manager at the Association of European Research Libraries in the Hague, the Netherlands. She coordinated the letter that declared the 22 May withdrawal from talks. 'There was really no point in us continuing to attend,' she says. Other signatories include the non-profit Open Knowledge Foundation in Cambridge, UK, and the National Centre for Text Mining at the University of Manchester, UK ..."