Our Protocol for Text-mining: Preamble and “Institutionalism”; Elsevier and other publishers should take note « petermr's blog

“I have been invited by the UK Intellectual Property Office to collect information and produce a reply to the Hargreaves report on copyright reform. The particular area that Ben Hawes (IPO) and I agreed on is ‘text-mining...’ We are doing this under the aegis of the Open Knowledge Foundation and with the help of their software. However it is not appropriate for the OKF, as a partner in the UK Government Transparency activity, to lobby for change so it will be an ad hoc group of identified individuals...It is probable, however, that the protocols we intend to develop will be part of the OKF activity, perhaps under the ‘Panton’ brand. Our group will represent that very serious harm is done to science and the use of science by the refusal to allow textmining. We shall be preparing our material completely in the open coordinated on http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-access. Anyone can take part in the discussion and interested parties such as publishers are invited... We shall concentrate on a small subset of high-profile publishers, probably limited to Wiley/Blackwell, Elsevier, Springer, Nature, AAAS (Science), PLoS, BMC and because of my involvement in chemistry ACS and RSC... The publishers argue, from their own surveys, that the scholarly community assert that publishers are extremely helpful over text-mining and agree to a large percentage of requests (data collated by Eefke Smit, STM publishers’ association). Our group asserts the opposite – that publishers have been extremely unhelpful... We shall also argue that the publishers ‘institutionally’ oppose text-mining... This is reflected in the large number of barriers, whether conscious or not, that publishers put in place or leave in place that effectively prevent text-mining. Institutionalism is defined as ‘the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people’ and I assert that the scholarly publishing industry is almost universally guilty of this for its READERS... THIS DISCOURSE NOW INCLUDES THE NINE PUBLISHERS ABOVE AND THE STM PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION. I SHALL EXPECT THEM TO BE AWARE OF THE DISCOUSRE AND TO PROVIDE CONTACT DETAILS ON THE OPEN-ACCESS LIST... If a publisher fails to take part in public discourse on text-mining and fails to comment on the principles and protocols we shall create on the list we shall represent them to Hargreaves as ‘institutionally opposed to text-mining’. The response to Hargreaves will consist of a number of questions which (generally) require the response ‘YES’ to be seen as helpful to the provision of text-mining. A typical one is: ‘Do you agree that facts and data are uncopyrightable?’ The following are examples of ‘not-YES’: [1] Failure to reply [2] Additional of conditions... [3] ‘I don’t have authority to answer this question’... [4] Promises to ‘get back to us’ ... [5] Asserting that OPEN-ACCESS should have approached person X rather than person Y. Any publisher who is actually well-intentioned towards textmining should be trivially able to answer the questions in half an hour. Any publisher who has to worry about them is probably guilty of institutionalism. PUBLISHERS and STM-PUBLISHERS ... your immediate action should be to register with the OPEN-ACCESS list and make known the identity of the persons who will answer questions for Hargreaves. That can be done today (It’s a working day in most countries).”