UK Publishers Moan About Content Mining's Possible Problems; Dismiss Other Countries' Actual Experience | Techdirt

"One of the recommendations made by the Hargreaves Review in the UK was that a text- and data-mining exception to copyright should be created, with the following explanation of why that made sense....Who could possibly object to that? Certainly not the UK government, which accepted the recommendation....Nonetheless, the UK Publishers Association...is unhappy. Here's Richard Mollet, the Association's CEO, explaining why it is against the idea of such a text-mining exception....[OA] would answer Mollet's fear that publishers' "platforms would collapse under the technological weight of crawler-bots." Since the papers could be freely downloaded from any one of the servers holding copies around the Internet, and then analysed on the researcher's own machine, there would be no crawler-bots involved at all. Open access would also eliminate the commercial risk: after all, what's the point in pirating material that is already freely available? As for that competitive disadvantage Mollet is worried about, moving their academic titles to open access would actually give UK publishers a big advantage, since open access continues to sweep through the academic sector. It would mean that UK publishers were leading the way, rather than dragging their heels at the back."