UK chemist on Elsevier's ban on textmining

An outrage. I know an eminent chemist who will not referee for Elsevier--he was ahead of his time. The monopoly that the scientific publishers have consists of controlled access to 60 years of copyrighted work. An embargo of a few years after publication would be considerably better than what we have, but the intellectual monopolists want those billions. The cost of publishing hasn't gone up--the money is going into their executive suites. And most likely to their executive's sweetie pies.

I'm not sure how a tool to read some text and display a diagram of the chemical reaction described falls under the "law" of the quoted passage. Copyright law certainly allows for this, so all the journals can do is say, "you don't get to buy our feed anymore if you run your program on our articles," but surely this is a game of chicken because no company wants to lose tens of thousands of dollars a year for no reason.<p>I would implement this as a browser plugin that uploads the content to a server (like Google Translate), and let the journals deal with each rogue user individually.<p>Telling people what software they can use to read text doesn't scale.

I think prevention of semantic extraction to diagrams would better pitched as "another unforeseen negative consequence of agreeing to Elsevier's terms", rather than as a significant part of the problem. If this story became a major part of the larger narrative, Elsevier could respond to this particular concern in a limited way (special access for researchers that apply for it), rather than dealing with the more central concerns.

Here is the follow-up he mentioned: Textmining: My years negotiating with Elsevier, <a href="http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011/11/27/textmining-my-years-negotiating-with-elsevier/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011/11/27/textmining-my-years...</a>

I feel really sad about this as well. I actually happened to have published a few articles in Elsevier journals. I wish what I published is available for everyones eyes. The point of publishing it was to share my findings with the world not only with those who pay.<p>To make more a available and searchable I actually uploaded everything to academia.edu. I hope they don't get sued by Wiley and/or Elsevier for what the service they offer. If anyone wants to check out some chemistry you can check out what I have here <a href="http://unlv.academia.edu/AlexiNedeltchev" rel="nofollow">http://unlv.academia.edu/AlexiNedeltchev</a><p>Few side thoughts: I think there are many things that can be improved in the science publishing: 1. Articles could be more interactive by providing discussion /commenting section. 2. Currently, if you want to see if the article you are checking out is worth reading you have to refer to the overall rating of the journal (this is known was impact factor). I think every article should have separate ratings. That way you can tell which are high impact articles and which are not. Btw the impact factors is calculated based on how many articles referred the article in hand. Does that sound familiar? It's the same concept as a webpage SEO. The more links pointing in the higher the rank. 3. Publishing process is every inefficient. It takes months to get something published since it was to be peer-reviewed. This obsolete approach that begs to be improved. Any ideas?

Repost of my comment on the blog (because waiting in the queue and not approved).<p>You should take the time to discuss a bit with your librarian. As I did my PhD in Denmark (DTU), I naively wrote a robot to download the issues of a well known chemical data journal. In about a week of balanced usage, I went to discuss with our librarian. He had seen my usage, was nice not to talk about it, but told me this: I downloaded more than the entire university in a year… and it was not a lot. It means that at that time, they paid a bit less than the $35 per article price.<p>What is really important to notice is that Elsevier are not selling knowledge for most of the scientific communities but influence. That is, you are published, cited, you get ranking and your university reward you. This is what we need to address if we want to have really open access. We need a better way to “sell” influence to the university researchers and deans.<p>As I am building Cheméo <a href="http://chemeo.com" rel="nofollow">http://chemeo.com</a> a chemical data search engine, I suffer too. It is maybe time to unit and propose a legal, efficient and rewarding way for the researchers to publish their papers. We can do that on the side and let our influence grow.<p>Additional notes for HN readers as yeah, we are a bit more on the programming side. What we basically need is a parallel DOI system easy to use, able to load all the open repositories and able to accept "direct" submissions.<p>We are not going to solve the problem in a year, this is an influence issue, it will take time, years, to really address it, be it by our own work or by "law".

This is precisely where the Copyright Office (and its UK equivalent} can step in and make explicit that textmining in this fashion is unambiguously fair use.

Google "Swanson linking". This. ban. is probably impeding discovery along that vector as well.

It's not the semantic interpretation of text that they're banning, but the scraping of text, which deals with copying what they'd prefer to sell you. Still an abhorrence, but let's get our facts straight.

Easy solution, create a human intelligence task distribution system, have every university that has access participate, assign lab students to perform the HIT of downloading the document. Voila problem solved.<p>After it's all been mined stop submitting to Elsvier.

Why can they do that and be listened to? Why not do the textmining anyway and say "so sue me"?

So I can't use Ctrl-F?

End copyright.

Until the academia realizes that computers can read too, it's important for companies that DO have access to these papers (like google scholar[1]) to create 3rd party APIs so that we can at least have better search tools.<p>1. <a href="http://code.google.com/p/google-ajax-apis/issues/detail?id=109" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/google-ajax-apis/issues/detail?id=1...</a>

Just throwing it into the mix, what would it take to convince Google to stop indexing the content of journal articles from closed-access journals? Surely without search, the articles are siloed; both journals and authors get a taste of the importance of opening access.