[GOAL] Re: OA and scholarly publishers

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 1:16 PM, Richard Poynder <ricky at 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-with-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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