Why restrict revolutionary research?

“With talk of the opportunities of big data, we look at the copyright issue that could be a potential stumbling block for UK companies innovating through data and text mining. In his review into Intellectual Property and growth Professor Hargreaves recommended that content mining in the form of data and text mining should be exempted from copyright legislation as it can be a beneficial technology in the advancement of scientific research. The Consultation on Copyright defined text and data mining as: ‘automated analytical techniques…copying existing electronic information, for instance articles in scientific journals and other works and analysing the data they contain for patterns, trends and other useful information’. A theoretical application would be a search of papers that research cancer for the number of times a particular gene is mentioned and identifying a pattern to determine if the gene is a factor in developing a treatment. Data and text mining provides a number of key benefits. As Hargreaves pointed out, the technology adds considerable value to scientific research by cutting costs. The Consultation on Copyright outlined that the ‘costs to British researchers from the time spent looking for the right material to read form a significant proportion of the overall cost of research’. Furthermore, in response to the Hargreaves report, the British Library provided an example of a company saving $3 million and reducing the ‘time spent sorting documents by 50% and reduced data errors by 10-15%’. The public would see benefits too as improving the quality of research would facilitate ‘new scientific breakthroughs and the development of new technology and medicines’. National Centre for Text Mining presented evidence of text mining being used successfully in developments in a number of medical areas, including, central nervous system tumours; cleft lip and palate; and malformation syndromes. Not to mention the benefits to the economy as a whole. In May this year the Guardian reported that data and text mining could add £200 billion to the European economy... Despite these benefits in the majority of cases data and text mining cannot take place right now, with lots of restrictions put in place by publishers be it a out-right block on mining, or the payment of an additional license fee to mine content which users have already paid to access. The Publishers Association argue that data and text mining without licensing would prevent them “from ensuring security of content” and it would remove the incentive for publishers to support effective research publishing. The argument is that the deregulation of data and text mining would lead to a need for increased investment to ‘support the data-feed for computerised trawling or the extra downloading demand’, however if an exception were made the publishers would not need to provide any extra capacity at all and the platforms used by researchers would provide this. The BIS Select Committee’s report, ‘The Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property: Where next?’, which agreed with the majority of Hargreaves’s recommendations, understands the need for opening up published data, however in supporting the Publisher’s Association’s call for a licensing based approach, means it would ultimately limit the UK’s potential in this important innovative research method... as sensationalist as it sounds, data and text mining is a method that can be used by academics to assist in saving lives from diseases such as cancer and malaria research. Mendeley, for example, provides access to over 13 million medicine research documents. The lack of data and text mining here is seriously hampering development of new medical breakthroughs in the UK when it can already take place in other countries who already allow data and text mining for research purposes...”