<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 12:48 PM, Hans Falk Hoffmann <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:Hans.Falk.Hoffmann@cern.ch">Hans.Falk.Hoffmann@cern.ch</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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<span style="font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";color:#1f497d">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. </span></div></div></blockquote><br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br clear="all">
</div><br>-- <br>Peter Murray-Rust<br>Reader in Molecular Informatics<br>Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry<br>University of Cambridge<br>CB2 1EW, UK<br>+44-1223-763069<br>