[Open-access] Fwd: Freedom to mine factual information from full-text of NPG articles

Wed Apr 25 14:08:16 UTC 2012

PMR initial e-mail to Nature

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk>
Date: Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 9:53 AM
Subject: Freedom to mine factual information from full-text of NPG articles
To: "Philip Campbell, Editor Nature" <p.campbell at nature.com>
Cc: Patricia Killiard <pk219 at cam.ac.uk>, Edmund Chamberlain <emc59 at cam.ac.uk>,
Peter Morgan <pbm2 at cam.ac.uk>, "Hannay, Timo" <t.hannay at nature.com>

Philip,
We are making a submission in response to the Hargreaves report and
specifically about the freedom to extract and publish factual information
from scientific publications. I have appreciated your cooperation in the
past over the requirement to publish data that supports scientific
research. I have copied Timo who, as you know, has supported our research
here in developing semantic informatics, including tools for extraction.
This involved a summer student and in-kind support for our Sciborg (EPSRC)
project. You'll know that two of our staff have since joined Timo's Digital
Science; and we are very proud to produce valuable human resources.

We are now in the position where we can extract factual chemical
information from the full text of articles with high precision and recall
(OPSIN accuracy is > 99.5% and recall > 95%) and with great speed and
cost-effectiveness. The University of Cambridge is a subscriber to NPG
journals and we would like to begin to extract information on a systematic
basis for Open scientific research. We don’t need technical help or
permission from NPG. We have copied Cambridge University Library staff.

This mail is to ask your assurance that we can do this without (a)
legal/contractual barriers from NPG and (b) that we shall not be cut off by
NPG robots (unfortunately this happened some years ago). We wish to start
immediately to show Hargreaves the benefit of information mining – they
have a deadline for 2012-03-21 so we would like your agreement by
2012-03-15. All we require is:

*YES: you may mine and publish factual information from the full text of
NPG journals without additional payment and without restriction from legal
and technical barriers.*

I hope you can trust me to act responsibly on not violating copyright and
being considerate to your robots. I have set out more details and a
non-exhaustive illustration of facts in
http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2012/03/04/information-mining-and-hargreaves-i-set-out-the-absolute-rights-for-readers-non-negotiable.

Unfortunately any other reply than YES by 2012-03-15 will be regarded as
unacceptable for the purposes of Hargreaves.

You will note that we are also approaching other major publishers of
chemistry. Elsevier has already publicly said we can mine their content for
research and we’ll be publishing the facts under an Open licence.

Best wishes,

Peter

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

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

-- 
Naomi Lillie
Foundation Administrator and Community Coordinator (Open Bibliography)
Open Knowledge Foundation
http://okfn.org/
Skype: n.lillie
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