[GOAL] How much of the content in open repositories is able to meet the definition of open access?

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Tue, Jan 24, 2017 at 2:10 PM, Heather Morrison <
Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca> wrote:

> Another critique that may be more relevant to this argument: I challenge
> PMR's contention that it is necessary to limit this kind of research to
> works that are licensed CC-BY. If you gather data from a great many
> different tables and analyze it, what you will be publishing is your own
> work.
>
> This is no different from doing a great deal of reading and thinking and
> writing a new work that draws on this knowledge, with appropriate citations
> to the works that you have read.
>
> Copyright is only invoked if you want to actually copy an original table
> for inclusion in a publication. If you are drawing on data from thousands
> of tables it is not clear how often this will happen. If what you want to
> copy is an insubstantial amount this would be covered under fair dealing.
> If the work is free-to-read, whether All Rights Reserved or under an open
> license, you can point readers to the original. At worst, this is a minor
> inconvenience.
>

This is completely wrong. The problem is that this is a legal issue and
copyright law, by default, covers all aspects of copying. Copying material
into a machine for the purpose of mining involves copyright. Whether it
seems reasonable or fair is irrelevant. If you carry out mining then you
should be prepared to answer in court.

The problem is compounded by:
* it is jurisdiction-dependent. Fair-use only exists in certain domains. It
is not the same as fair dealing which is generally weaker. What is
permissible in the US may not be in UK and vice versa.
* It is extremely complex. Guessing the law will not be useful.
* Much of the law has not been tested in court. "Non-commercial" is not
what you or I would like it to mean. It is what a court finds when I or
others are summoned before it.

I have been involved in this for over 4 years in the UK and in Europe
(Parliament and Commission). There is no consensus on what should be
allowed and what will ultimately be decided by the Commission and Member
States. I have taken legal opinion on some of this and consulted with other
experts and the answers are often unclear.

The legality of Text and Data Mining is formally unrelated to whether the
miner publishes the results or not.


> If you prefer to limit your research to works that are CC-BY licensed, it
> is your right to make this choice. Many other researchers, myself included,
> work with a wide range of data and do not choose to limit what we gather to
> works that are licensed CC-BY. One example from my own research: if a
> publisher has a table listing APCs, I screen scrape the table, pop the data
> into a spreadsheet, and work with it.
>

The primary issue for Text and data Mining is automated analysis of many
tables. This is an inconsistency in the law that we are trying to get
legislators to change.


> Even publishers that use CC-BY for articles usually have All Rights
> Reserved for pages that contain this type of information.
>

Do you have metrics for this. Because this is incompatible with the licence
and should be challenged - as I frequently do.


> If I limited myself to data sources that are CC-BY I could not do this
> kind of research.
>

I agree that this is limiting and that is why it would be useful for
scientific material to be licensed CC BY.

In summary this is a complex legal question and the answers have to be
based on law not guesswork.


>
>
>
-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader Emeritus in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dept. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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