[Open-access] Discussions with Elsevier on information-mining

Tue Mar 6 08:24:09 UTC 2012

This worries me greatly. Read it. It effectively acknowledges Elsevier's
right to control what Universities can and cannot do. I have spent a
fruitless few days being pushed around by Elsevier and I know the signs all
too well.

Libraries have signed away our rights because they didn't value them. One
of the great disasters of modern scholarship. Now they are trying to get
them back.

Effectively:
Elsevier: "our contract states that we have complete rights to forbid you
to do anything other than humanly read our material"
Librarians: "OK." (Maybe because they got a Big Deal in return.
Scientists: "We have a right to mine the literature"
Elsevier: "OK you can have bits of it as long as we control it"

This is similar to HINARI. Publishers forbid the third worlds all access to
scholarship and then give bits of it back. Aren't they generous.

I shall blog it. I am now very depressed. We have ceded yet more rights and
territory.

FWIW Elsevier has offered to let me text mine if I explain my project to
them and they agree and propose a special case for PeterMR because he's had
an unfortunate time with Elsevier.

On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 6:20 AM, Björn Brembs <b.brembs at googlemail.com>wrote:

> Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
>
> > I have been contacted by Alicia Wise of Elsevier about their refusal to
> > allow me unrestricted mining of the content in Elsevier journals.
>
> See a similar discussion here:
>
>
> http://researchremix.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/talking-text-mining-with-elsevier
>
> Bjoern
>
>
>
> --
> Björn Brembs
> ---------------------------------------------
> http://brembs.net
> Neurobiology
> Freie Universität Berlin
> Germany
>
>

-- 
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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