EU Commission sets out plan to allow free data mining - Science|Business

"The European Commission has proposed a new regulation which would clear the way for researchers to perform text and data mining, as part of a broad update of European copyright rules. Under the proposed new rule tabled for early next year, researchers in Europe would have free rein to use computer programmes to search journals, a practice which is tightly controlled by publishers. To date, the UK is the only country that has exempted automated computer crawling from copyright law. This will benefit public interest research organisations, while taking into account the impact of a new law on the publishing market, the Commission claimed. Researchers have battled for years to get permission from publishers to use programmes that can extract data from thousands of publications to which their institutions subscribe saying, “the right to read is the right to mine.” Given this, computer “reading” should require no higher level of permission than human reading. Over the past year Research Commissioner, Carlos Moedas has been pushing for the right for researchers to mine papers unhindered, and he hailed the proposal as a staging post in moves to completely open up access to the outputs of publicly-funded research ..."