[Open-access] A publisher writes...

Mon Mar 12 14:39:08 UTC 2012

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 1:53 PM, Richard Kidd <KiddR at rsc.org> wrote:

> Hi Mike
>
> But the communication says
>
> "Unfortunately any other reply than YES by 2012-03-15 will be regarded as
> unacceptable for the purposes of Hargreaves."
>
> Which is all about a specific stance, isn't it? The only data is whether
> we agree with a request to mine, yes or no, and is put in the context of
> showing Hargreaves the benefits of mining. So as an information gathering
> exercise on policy I'm not sure it'll work.
>

Our history of getting precise answers out of publishers shows that they
are extremely reluctant to give any definitive answers. For example your
colleague Tony Williams waited for years for an answer from the American
Chemical Society on data in Crystaleye (as did we). We've tried for 2.5
years to get useful replies from Elsevier - we are now finally getting
fragmented statements.

The STM publishers' association stresses how helpful the publishers are to
people wanting to text-mine. There are no contacts listed in any publisher
I know (other than CC-BY publishers where they are not needed). Has the RSC
stated anywhere what is its policy on textmining - what it allows and what
it does not. If you wish to make a proactive statement for the world we'd
be delighted

And the Hargreaves report is, in part, due to publishers not being helpful
and proactive.

In other news, there was a CCC meeting on Data and Text Mining in Amsterdam
> last week,

[== Copyright Clearance Centre - an orgnanization which acts to protect
Copyright holders rights.]

Thanks for the news.

> and a draft cross-publisher mining license has been prepared for
> discussion with the pharma people; there's also a working group on a common
> text mining format.
>
> We would be grateful for details.

P.

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-access/attachments/20120312/bca70db4/attachment.html>