[Open-access] Fwd: FW: Freedom to mine factual information from Springer journals

Wed Apr 25 15:00:40 UTC 2012

Additional response from Springer

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Straalen van, Berendina, Springer SBM NL <B.vanStraalen at springer.com>
Date: Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 4:45 PM
Subject: FW: Freedom to mine factual information from Springer journals
To: "pm286 at cam.ac.uk" <pm286 at cam.ac.uk>
Cc: "Goerner, Bettina, Springer DE" <Bettina.Goerner at springer.com>, "Stelt
van der, Wim, Springer SBM NL" <Wim.vanderStelt at springer.com>

 Dear dr. Rust,

Thank you for your message to our offices.

To reply to your question, this is needed because systematic downloading is
a copyright description and is independent from the publisher’s decision.

However, Springer is very open minded on crawling for research purposes.

One has to keep in mind though that mining may have negative impact on the
structure of the website and will disturb user statics.

>From that point of view I may understand that mining is subject to separate
accounts and agreements and reporting in order to keep a clear view on the
traffic of the publisher’s site.

Best regards

Berendina van Straalen
Springer
Head of Rights and Permissions
Special Licensing Department
Van Godewijckstraat 30 | 3311 GX Dordrecht
P.O.Box 17 | 3300 AA Dordrecht
The Netherlands
Tel. +31 78 657 62 10
Fax +31 78 657 63 00
www.springer.com

*Book fairs* - permissions.bookfairs at springer.com
*Translation rights *- translations.dordrecht at springer.com
offers: http://www.springer.com/rights?SGWID=0-122-0-0-0
*Special Licensing* - *TPL.dordrecht at springer.com*
*Permissions* – permissions.dordrecht at springer.com

*From:* peter.murray.rust at googlemail.com [
mailto:peter.murray.rust at googlemail.com <peter.murray.rust at googlemail.com>]
*On Behalf Of *Peter Murray-Rust
*Sent:* Monday, March 12, 2012 1:11 PM

*To:* Stelt van der, Wim, Springer SBM NL
*Subject:* Re: Freedom to mine factual information from Springer journals

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 12:03 PM, Stelt van der, Wim, Springer SBM NL <
Wim.vanderStelt at springer.com> wrote:

Peter,

Sending me a request like this on a saturday morning with such a short
deadline is quite challenging. I need to figure out the licencing terms and
see what we can do.

I appreciate that it's short notice. I am not deliberately trying to put
you under pressure. I was hoping the answer would be simple. That Springer
would be able to say "YES, everyone can textmine facts".  If it's not
simple, then that's the situation that I have to report.

FWIW I have been trying to get clear terms out of assorted publishers for
several years and failing with many. I couldn't get a clear answer out of
Springer 4 years ago on their Open Access licences in hybrid journals. It's
not a new issue.

By contrast with BMC I can answer the question in 15 seconds - inspect the
licence and that's it.

So no, I am not trying to be confrontational but all major publisher,
whether deliberately or not, make it almost impossible to get clear
information. Unless Jan Velterop had given me your name I wouldn't have
know where to go in Springer

Best

Peter

Wim

Wim van der Stelt
Springer
EVP Business Development

*From*: Peter Murray-Rust [mailto:pm286 at cam.ac.uk]
*Sent*: Saturday, March 10, 2012 11:16 AM
*To*: Stelt van der, Wim, Springer SBM NL
*Cc*: Patricia Killiard <pk219 at cam.ac.uk>; Peter Morgan <pbm2 at cam.ac.uk>;
Edmund Chamberlain <emc59 at cam.ac.uk>
*Subject*: Freedom to mine factual information from Springer journals

 Wim,
[We corresponded earlier. If you are not the correct person in Springer to
answer the question below please can you forward it to the person who is,
let me know their name/email and ask them to reply substantively to me.]

We are making representations in response to the Hargreaves report and in
particular about the freedom to use machines to extract and publish factual
information from scientific publications without legal and technical
barriers.

We are now in the position where we can extract factual chemical
information from the full text of articles with high precision and recall
(accuracy is > 99.5% and recall > 95%) and with great speed and
cost-effectiveness. The University of Cambridge is a subscriber to Springer
journals and we would like to begin to extract information on a systematic
basis for Open scientific research. This applies to all Springer journals,
not just BMC and Springer Open. We don’t need technical help or permission
from the Springer . 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 Springer and (b) that we shall not be cut
off by Springer robots. 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 Springer 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
science. 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

-- 
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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-access/attachments/20120425/80671473/attachment.html>