Peter
To what extent does "fair-use" over-ride the publisher wishes? It seems to me that the Australian copyright act is quite clear about using copyright material for criticism, legal purposes, extracting data, etc, but I am not an expert in UK law. Lawyers could have a good argument too about whether copyright acts say anything about eyeballing whatsoever. Is automatic text speaking (for blind persons) not permitted, or reading aloud by others? Can the speech program not index the material so one can find something one heard earlier? This whole mess depends on totally obsolete copyright legislation. Arthur Sale Tasmania, Australia From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Peter Murray-Rust Sent: Saturday, 12 May 2012 8:47 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: OA and scholarly publishers On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 1:16 PM, Richard Poynder <ri...@richardpoynder.co.uk> wrote: Many thanks to Alicia Wise for starting a new conversation thread. Let's recall that Alicia's question was, "what positive things are established scholarly publishers doing to facilitate the various visions for open access and future scholarly communications that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized?" Alicia Wise already knows my reply - she has had enough email from me. The publishers show withdraw contractual restrictions on content-mining. That's all they need to do. My university has paid Elsevier for subscription to the content in Elsevier journals. I believe I have the right to mine the content. Elsevier has written a contract which forbids me to use this in any way other than reading with human eyeballs - I cannot crawl it, index it, extract content for whatever purpose. I have spent THREE years trying to deal with Elsevier and get a straight answer. See http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011/11/27/textmining-my-years-negotiating-wit h-elsevier/ The most recent "discussions" ended with Alicia Wise suggesting that she and Cambridge librarians discuss my proposed research and see if they could agree to my carrying it out. I let the list decide whether this is a constructive offer or a delaying tactic. It certainly does not scale if all researchers have to get the permission of their librarians and every publisher before they can mine the content in the literature. And why should a publisher decide what research I may or may not do? All of this is blogged on http://blogs.cam.ac.uk/pmr Yes - I asked 6 toll-access publishers for permission to mine their content before I submitted my opinion to the Hargreaves enquiry. Of the 6 publishers (which we in the process of summarising - this is hard because of the wooliness of the language) the approximate answers were: 1 possibly 4 mumble (e.g. "let's discuss it with your librarians") 1 no (good old ACS pulls no punches - I'd rather have a straight "no" than "mumble") In no other market would vendors be allowed to get away with such awful customer service. A straight question deserves a straight answer, but not in scholarly publishing. Just in case anyone doesn't understand content mining, the technology is straightforward. The only reason it's not done is because Universities are afraid of publishers. I estimate that tens of billions of dollars worth of value is lost through being forbidden to mine the scholarly literature. If Alicia Wise can say "yes" to me unreservedly, I'll be happy. P. -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069
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