#contentmining and #elsevier’s terms; The small print absolutely prevents responsible science « petermr's blog

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-02-08

Summary:

"I am systematically going through Elsevier’s terms and conditions for content mining (TDM) see http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2014/02/06/elseviers-tdm-terms-tac-can-they-force-us-to-copyright-data-2/ and previous. In this I look at what I must sign up for. The term 'Dataset' appears to refer to Elsevier’s collection of papers (probably only in XML), possibly some images if they allow access – effectively the target of what I would intend to mine ... '2. USER RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBILITIES ...  2.2  The User may not other than for the uses as permitted above:   ...    §  abridge, modify, translate or create any derivative work based on the Dataset ...'  I simply don’t understand this. My TDM output is a derivative work, isn’t it? So I can create a TDM output but not modify it. If I discover something went wrong I can’t amend it. I can’t abridge it. So I can’t filter my output for different purposes or because it’s too big to fit on a disk? I expect Universal Access staff will tell me that I have misunderstood this and say it’s all OK really. But this is a legal document. They can’t interpret it for me. Only a lawyer can. And I can’t translate it. Our OPSIN software can in principle be modified to translate chemical names to other languages. This is forbidden. Now I expect that detailed discussion with the helpful Universal Access people we could resolve this. It would take a few months. And I don’t have a few months. And for 100 other publishers with similar licences? (This is why we walked out of Licences for Europe – exactly to avoid the waste of time and restrictions I am showing you). [BTW in the time it has taken to write this para we can mine 50 papers from PLoS or BMC with zero hassle] ..."

Link:

https://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2014/02/07/contentmining-and-elseviers-terms-the-small-print-absolutely-prevents-responsible-science/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.elsevier oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.policies oa.mining oa.copyright oa.licensing oa.libre

Date tagged:

02/08/2014, 07:46

Date published:

02/08/2014, 02:46