[GOAL] Re: Nice blog post on OA

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 12:48 PM, Hans Falk Hoffmann <
Hans.Falk.Hoffmann at cern.ch> wrote:

> What about privately funded research results? They are not so different.
> If patented they move into the public domain only after about 20 years of
> privileged use. Society could debate different (shorter) time spans and
> limited privileged use to increase the common use and to appreciate or
> validate the contribution of the underlying public scientific base.
> Pharmaceutical results are quite prominent in this as their gainful use may
> adversely affect the health of many millions of people.
>

There is a confusion here between copyright and patents. The information in
a patent is in the public domain; reproducing this does not infringe
copyright (in most domains as far as I know).  The patent gives the
inventor 20 years (depends on jurisdiction) to *exploit* the patent.

Patents are useful to my group because they are one of the few sources of
chemical information that we can use automatically for text-mining without
infringing copyright. We have done this for tens of thousands of patents
from USPTO and EPO. By contrast we have tried over years to get
closed-access publishers to allow textmining for chemical information and
been treated with disdain. We can only use publications where there is a
clear licence of at least CC-BY. It is apparently more important to
preserve income for publishers than to allow published information to be
used in a modern manner.

-- 
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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