Researchers Pull Out of Talks With Publishers On Text-Mining 67
ananyo writes "Disagreement between scientists and publishers has grown on a thorny issue: how to make it easier for computer programs to extract facts and data from online research papers. On 22 May, researchers, librarians and others pulled out of European Commission talks on how to encourage the techniques, known as text mining and data mining. The withdrawal has effectively ended the contentious discussions, although a formal abandonment can be decided only after a commission review in July. Scientists have chafed for years at limitations on computer-aided research. They would like to use computer programs to crawl over thousands or millions of articles and other online research content, extracting data to build up databases or to pick out patterns such as associations between genes and diseases. But in many parts of the world, including Europe (though perhaps not in the U.S. — the situation is unclear), this sort of use currently requires permission from the content's copyright owner. Even if an institution has paid to access a journal, its academics do not necessarily have permission to mine the text."
Sad ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The people who do the science and write the papers produce the content. Yet somehow the publisher controls how it gets used thereafter.
Everyone is so damned beholden to copyright that it more or less constrains how you do anything.
And they wonder why people are pushing for open access -- it's time to cut the buggy whip makers out of the equation.
If you took public money to do this, it should be open. If you want it to be locked down and proprietary, don't publish.
Re:Well, this is simple. (Score:5, Insightful)
Translation: Invent the wheel many many times! Don't you DARE share the data on wheels with others without first getting permission to replicate data from the spoke makers, and rim makers!
Fuck off AC. Look at the internet as a model on how unfettered data proliferation prevents biases from dominating information use. (What's that barbara striesand? That pictue of your beach house is STILL on the internet? Fancy that!) Allowing researchers to share and vet each of these databases you want them to all make independently is EXACTLY how this technology should be used, BECAUSE it prevents usedful data from being hushed up, or forgotten, and gives that data its due. The scientists that created the data want the data shared. The scientists that ewant the data, want it shared.
The only group that does NOT want the data shared, is the publishing industry, because if the data leaves their grimy little fingers, they can't charge rent.
That's the real issue here.
Re:Now that it's moving up the cognitive chain... (Score:4, Insightful)
Name a journal that has paid a researcher to publish a paper. I'll tell you, there isn't one, researchers have to pay a "submission fee" to have their paper even considered if accepted copyright is often deferred to the journal, then they have to subscribe to the journal to read it. Infact the only thing the actual publisher pays for in this whole mess is the paper and ink to print the thing. I'm going to guess this is just another nail in the coffin of traditional academic journals as the researchers start taking more of their papers elsewhere for publishing.
Re:Sad ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone is so damned beholden to copyright that it more or less constrains how you do anything.
This is not just a failure of copyright, this is an institutional failure where the "publisher" gets to control the entire scientific debate and profit on all ingress and egress of data. Copyright is just the weapon the publisher is brandishing to force even more people to pay them.
How is this even tenable long-term? What curation do these journals provide? Why are they regarded as anything more than leeches?
Re:Now that it's moving up the cognitive chain... (Score:5, Insightful)
Give the researchers a few years with the current trends, when it becomes clearer that if nobody associated with their work is getting paid for it, they won't be either.
The researchers are paid with grants, they're not paid directly through publishing. If I publish a paper in Nature, it gets included in text mining, and people cite it from the text mine, that benefits me EVEN if no one ever actually reads the paper. If zero people pay for access to my article, that doesn't matter to me. If a billion people pay $30 to see my article, that doesn't matter to me. It matters only to the publisher.
And data mining can't replace most researchers doing benchwork. Barring AI, data mining is not going to come up with brilliant theories or insights, and barring robots, data mining is not going to do benchwork.
Publishers have a lot to fear from this, not researchers.
Re:Sad ... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a free market.
No it isn't. When your livelihood requires X papers published to be in a small set of predetermined circulars, you cannot simply stick a pdf on cesspits like arXiv.org.