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."
Re: (Score:1)
And you have failed to notice that the researchers are all for this, which is why they pulled out when publishers weren't cooperating.
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: (Score:2)
Google doesn't place ads on Scholar results. Publishers do not provide financial incentives to scientific authors. This isn't about any particular company acquiring free rights to scientific texts. This is about computer science and bioinformatics researchers in the text mining area acquiring rights to texts which they themselves (or the scientific community in general) have created in the past. Publishers do not create scientific texts.
An example of this type of text mining work is the detection of protein
Re: (Score:3)
Grants will cease to exist when all value accrues to the companies mining and distributing the data by the most efficient means possible, such as Google... If X is a university or government agency providing funding or a grant, the economic process remains the same. Ultimately there is no reason for any value to accrue to any other entity, if the answer for Big Data Corp. is always "wait for somebody to provide content for free, or mine it, and slap an ad on it".
That doesn't make any sense. The government is not looking for a direct return on the grant, particularly not in the form of publication income. The incentive for the government agency to provide the grants is still there: to advance science. If it ends up open access, published by elsevier or others, or packaged into google's data, the research is still being done.
That's my point, as expressed. Frankly your evaluation of its correspondence with this particular case is of marginal interest to me. :p
So you're just interested in spouting general economic principles and ignori
Re: (Score:2)
The idea that the government need not return value from investment, per the perceptions of the public based on their expectations of private industry, is fiction.
Which is why I never suggested anything of the sort. To quote myself "The incentive for the government agency to provide the grants is still there: to advance science."
The government still gets their return on investment, even if google mines the data: the science is done. Whether the results appear only in Elsevier or whether they're included in a larger data set, the government and scientists get value out of the grant process. Only Elsevier and other publishers are hurt, which is why they're th
Re: (Score:2)
The NIH has an interest in finding a cure for cancer. They give money to researchers to add chemicals to cells and look at them under the microscope. Google repackaging published papers is not going to compete with that.
Re: (Score:2)
The NIH has an interest in finding a cure for cancer. They have a budget of $20 million to spend. Company A hires lots and lots of top-notch researchers to do the work for their proposal, spends $5 million on them, still turns a profit on their bid after paying all these researchers. Company B hires one research guy as a figurehead, waits 2 years for the exact same research to be done in a unrelated biology research project in academia, pays $100 for the data-mined results, pulls in $9 million profit direct to the shareholder's and executives bottom line. Out of generosity they kick back $1 million on PAC money to the politicians supportive of the clear "health care research efficiency benefits" they've provided and who also conveniently control future funding to the NIH. Next year, the grant is going down to $5 million, Company A is going out of business, or both.
Two things, one, grants from the NIH are judged by scientists in the field. Currently, the process can distinguish between company A doing actual research and company B rehashing research quite well.
Two, Company B can already get company A's results. They publish the results. Company B could already steal A's results and rehash them. Yet we don't see the problem you suggest.
For further examples, just look most anywhere in the U.S. The value science provides becomes increasingly accumulated by a narrower and narrower subset of the population, leaving a growing expanse of the unemployable whose skills aren't sufficiently differentiable, at least to CEO's, than hiring a new graduate at bottom dollar and plugging them into Google.
You're still making a general statement and insisting it applies to this specific area when it clearly doesn't. Data mining d
Re: (Score:1)
I think you've got the wrong end of the stick.
It's the researchers who want the text-mining capability.
The publishers, who add no value whatsoever, are standing in the way.
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: (Score:3)
It's definitely another point against subscription-fee journals (the "traditional" label is ambiguous; are open-access journals with standard review structures "traditional?").
That aside, I want to clarify: subscription-fee journals do not charge a submission fee, although they often charge for extra pages or color figures. The price then is signing over copyright on your work. In contrast, the open-access journals do charge a (quite large) submission fee. PLoS One for example charges $1,350. The OA journal
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
The researchers are protesting that they are not being allowed to mine the content that they have already paid to get. They are not arguing that the content should be available for free.
Re: (Score:1)
Many US universities already subscribe to services that do exactly this - usually through the school's library.
Re: (Score:1)
I guess the GP is proposing that the institutions should pay further sums of money to the publishers to buy this new privilege.
In my view the researchers should man the fuck up and start data mining without permission. I'd love to see the publishers trying to sue, say, Cancer Research UK. The public at large would begin to understand the rottenness at the heart of big copyright.
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: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
You have to enter into a contract to be given access, the terms of that contract certainly prohibit downloading the entire database. Just ask Aaron Swartz if he understands that yet.
It's my understanding that for me as a physical person, the law of my country voids any such contract clauses in the copyright law explicitly - meaning that doing so *could* be construed as violating terms of contract but it would never pass as copyright infringement (and yes, there's been a ruling of our Supreme Court on that, so there's hardly any wiggle room here).
Re: (Score:3)
You are ignorant of how scientific publishing works. The publishers are the free loaders. Scientists did the research, wrote the papers, edited and peer reviewed them on a volunteer basis and, indeed, typeset the final print versions.
The large scientific publishers are parasites who abuse their oligopoly powers to extract rents on the labor of the scientist.
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: (Score:1)
It's a free market. Why don't they just stop publishing their papers with publishers that blanket pay-wall content? It's the institutions fault for contracting shitty publishers.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Some publishers do require exclusivity. Some do not. There is a free-to-submit equivalent. Ironically, it's licence is also a bit restrictive for this sort of thing.
Basically, we got ourselves tied up here. It all made sense 20 years ago. Now it doesn't. The social incentives to give away our value for free are still there.
And the publishers want to keep this also. Trying to make understand the situation now is pointless; you have to look at the history.
Hopefully, the future will be better than the present.
Re: (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.
Re: (Score:2)
There are several reasons.
1) Prestige of specific journals
2) Former need for actual printing presses, etc.
3) Subscription-fee journals (i.e. with paywalls) do not charge submission fees (cost to publish is loss of copyright)
4) Open-access journals charge expensive submission fees ($1,350 for PLoS One)
Finally, institutions do not contract publishers to publish scientific content. Individual scientists submit their work to journals of their choosing, signing over copyright if necessary and paying any pub
and 5) (Score:3)
academic culture and the academic generation gap.
Hiring and tenure still involve large percentages of faculty that "came up" under the old system, and don't see the problem (don't have time to see the problem) that has emerged in academic publishing culture over the last couple of decades in particular. They don't see work published outside of the big name journals/publishers as "serious" or "academic" for the moment. So young academics wanting to build a career continue to support them and publish in them,
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know anyone, students and professors alike, who doesn't share this attitude about the big scientific publishers (at least in biology and computer science).
The problem in my opinion is that the previous generation just isn't willing to act on these convictions. Instead of going to good (high impact) OA journals like BMC, PLoS, etc., which costs money, they want to sign over their copyrights and get it over with, not realizing that this is itself a very high cost.
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: (Score:3)
It damages the literature beyond access to papers as well, since publishers sometimes use copyright to interfere with papers themselves. I was forced to remove a screenshot from one paper because the publisher's official position on fair-use was extremely narrow and would not allow screenshots. Perhaps this is simply due to risk-aversion: it's easier to just restrict fair-use than worry about how close to the line to get. But a more cynical person might suspect it's in the publisher's own interests to push
Re: (Score:2)
No, it's greed, pure and simple. Since the publishers and the copyright lobby don't believe in fair use, their position pretty much starts from there.
These are the people who want photocopiers outlawed because someone could be copying their stuff, and people who fight that people have right of first sale on books.
Pretty much uniformly, these guys all believe there shouldn't be f
Re: (Score:3)
If you want it to be locked down and proprietary, don't publish.
While I agree with you mostly, one of the biggest problems they have (especially in medicine) is unpublished papers.
Watch this: http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_what_doctors_don_t_know_about_the_drugs_they_prescribe.html [ted.com]
Over 100,000 people were killed in the United States due to 1 paper that went unpublished.
Re: (Score:2)
Yup, the pharma companies have been well known to hide the parts that don't support their claims, and they've also been known to latch onto secondary effects if it doesn't pan out for the original intent.
I've never understood how they can skip the step where they provide all of the data for an independent body to review.
We know they're in it just for profit, and they've demonstrated they'll take short cuts (or outright
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"Everyone is so damned beholden to copyright that it more or less constrains how you do anything."
No, you are confused. The issue here is about monopoly and market abuse, not Copyright.
Nobody says you have to sign your copyright over to a publisher. There's no law to that effect. It's just that a few publishers have locked up the market. That's monopoly (or oligopoly, if you want to get technical). It's not a matter of copyright, because the researcher can sell to whoever he wants to, or not at all. It's not a matter of capitalism, because monopoly is not part of a free market.
Stop blaming the thi
Re: (Score:2)
Pulling out (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:1)
This joke may not be well understood by many of the people who frequent this website.
Half of them will argue by what you mean by "prevention" as you've failed to identify what you are preventing.
The other half will wonder what consititutes a 'pulling out' and will argue about the fine details involved.
A small subset will argue that Bush didn't pull out, so why should Obama.
Another small subset will argue that we need to pull Obama out because he isn't an american.
An odd subset will argue that the last time
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think it's exactly feasible to download millions of articles by hand. You can scrape, like Aaron Schwartz did, but that doesn't seem like a great idea these days.
I agree with the sentiment, but we're talking about vast databases held internally by these publishers, not available information encumbered with a little fine print.
Aaron Swartz did a routine thing, journals knew it (Score:2)
As an NLP Bioinformatics guy, I believe the real crime Aaron Swartz committed was being in the news.
He isn't the first to have that dataset and he wont be the last.
We write papers using massive NLP scans of publications rather routinely.
Most of the time, the papers are downloaded from PubMed (public funded) so they can't even complain about bandwidth costs, etc.
For anyone who didn't know already, most subscription Publishers don't **DO** anything.
They are only slightly better than patent trolls, and in some
Use Bit Torrent for distribution (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Torrents die if nobody seeds them. If I've got a few gigabytes of data that only ten people want, possibly years apart, torrents won't work.
Re: (Score:2)
How hard is this? (Score:2)
Come on. The description of research methods , procedures, tests and results scientific papers, exists for the betterment of humankind, not to make people who own it rich. Get rich by Making Stuff, not exerting a monopolist's control on Knowledge.
How hard is this? All research and results conducted by higher ed should be available for free and the costs rolled into the tax base.
This is as basic as it gets. Roads bridges security and advances in knowledge.