Pushing the Frontier of Access for Text Mining: A Conversation with Heather Piwowar on One Researcher’s Attempt to Break New Ground

Use the link to access the full transcript of the interview as well as reactions from other researchers, librarians, and OA advocates. The interview opens with the following introduction: “Earlier this year, Heather Piwowar, a UBC postdoc in the Department of Zoology, was engaged in an online conversation with colleagues about available Elsevier content in PubMed Central’s Open Access Subset. Frustrated by the small number of Elsevier articles available for text mining, she tweeted that Elsevier should make its back issues available for text mining, for the progress of science. Much to her surprise Alicia Wise, Director of Universal Access for Elsevier and a participant in the dialogue, tweeted back and started a dialogue that led to an offer to work with Piwowar to facilitate text-mining access for researchers at her university. For details of the conversation, see Piwowar’s blog posts. Through numerous Skype calls and email, Elsevier executives, UBC librarians, and Piwowar herself have been negotiating an agreement to provide UBC researchers with broad text-mining rights to Elsevier subscription content. While this individual negotiation is not the ideal solution in the eyes of many Open Access advocates (including Piwowar!) many find it an encouraging step that may pressure Elsevier - and other publishers - to make digital articles more useful to researchers. In a recent conversation, Piwowar shared her story…..”