[open-science] JISC report released today on value of text mining

Wed Mar 14 10:55:17 UTC 2012

It was a very lively one.  David Baker (JISC) talked about how big data is simply too complex for individuals to process by hand.  Diane McDonald (consultant) reviewed the methodology and findings. Mark Walport talked about the advantages to researchers.  Martin Hall (Salford) spoke on how it helps HEIs.  Doug Kell (BBSRC) reiterated how hard it is to determine what permissions are available and how time-consuming it is to secure them across nearly 1000 publications and (I think it was Kell) cited a study showing that 66% of a researcher's time would be required just to process that many permissions.

The only person who admitted being anti-open mining was Richard Mollet of the Publisher's Association.  Privately he claimed that Elsevier said that it had only had a handful of requests to data mine and all had been allowed so Mollet asks why a blanket exception is needed with so few needy.  When pinned, it turned out he was only referring to requests that came through university subscriptions (i.e., not individual inquiries).  Publicly, he whined about how the study had not looked at the economic impact on publishers.  Some fellow from (?Nesta) immediately presented a series of cogent arguments about how open data benefitted publishers directly and then Walport summed it up by saying that open data is the future and publishers should just get with it or die. 

Kell mentioned (his?) article Nature 483 (March) "Trouble in the Text Mine". 

On Mar 14, 2012, at 9:51 AM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:

> 
> 
> On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 9:32 AM, Diane Cabell <dc at icommons.org> wrote:
> 
> http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2012/value-and-benefits-of-text-mining.aspx
> 
> They will be submitting a response to Hargreaves on this point but there may be some data in the report that we can cite in our submission.
> 
> Great. Unfortunately I missed yesterday's meeting on text-mining
> 
> P.
>  
> 
> dc
> 
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 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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