Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - The right to read is the right to mine « petermr's blog

[Using the link, see the full blog post for additional context and the comment section which resulted in the edits as seen below] “We – in the OKFN – have been spending some time on Etherpads and skype putting the principles of Open Content Mining. Yesterday we met on skype and decided that we’d done sufficient to take this to the world and get feedback and enhancement. Naomi Lillie (OKFN) will post the full version later and Peter Suber will link to it. This blogpost is an introduction and I’ll quote the central points... Principle 1: Right of Legitimate Accessors to Mine... We  assert that there is no legal, ethical or moral reason to refuse to  allow legitimate accessors of research content (OA or otherwise) to use  machines to analyse the published output of the research community.   Researchers expect to access and process the full content of the research literature with their computer programs and should be able to use their machines as they use their eyes. [a] The right to read is the right to mine.  Principle 2: Lightweight Processing Terms and Conditions... Mining  by legitimate subscribers should not be prohibited by contractual or  other legal barriers.  Publishers should add clarifying language in  subscription agreements that content is available for information mining  by download or by remote access.  Where access is through  researcher-provided tools, no further cost should be required. The right  to crawl is not the right to use a publisher’s API for free, however,  when access is through publisher-supplied programmatic interfaces, the  fees should be transparent and per-api-call.  Processing by subscribers  should be conducted within community norms of responsible behaviour in the electronic age   [a] Users and providers should encourage machine processing. [NOTE] Immediate feedback suggested deleting part of this section and I agree... Principle 3: Use...  Researchers can and will publish facts and excerpts which they discover by reading and processing documents.  They expect to disseminate aggregate statistical results as facts and context text as fair use excerpts, openly and with no restrictions other than attribution.  Publisher  efforts to claim rights in the results of mining further retard the  advancement of science by making those results less available to the  research community; Such claims should be prohibited. [a] Facts don’t belong to anyone.”