UK chemist on Elsevier's ban on textmining

Unlikely to happen, but in any case also unlikely to be all that effective. Google scholar is getting good, but when looking for papers I will usually use scopus/sciencedirect (Elsevier) or ISI (Thompson Reuters). Sowing the seeds of my own destruction and so forth.

Repost of my comment on the blog (because waiting in the queue and not approved).

You should take the time to discuss a bit with your librarian. As I did my PhD in Denmark (DTU), I naively wrote a robot to download the issues of a well known chemical data journal. In about a week of balanced usage, I went to discuss with our librarian. He had seen my usage, was nice not to talk about it, but told me this: I downloaded more than the entire university in a year… and it was not a lot. It means that at that time, they paid a bit less than the $35 per article price.

What is really important to notice is that Elsevier are not selling knowledge for most of the scientific communities but influence. That is, you are published, cited, you get ranking and your university reward you. This is what we need to address if we want to have really open access. We need a better way to “sell” influence to the university researchers and deans.

As I am building Cheméo http://chemeo.com a chemical data search engine, I suffer too. It is maybe time to unit and propose a legal, efficient and rewarding way for the researchers to publish their papers. We can do that on the side and let our influence grow.

Additional notes for HN readers as yeah, we are a bit more on the programming side. What we basically need is a parallel DOI system easy to use, able to load all the open repositories and able to accept "direct" submissions.

We are not going to solve the problem in a year, this is an influence issue, it will take time, years, to really address it, be it by our own work or by "law".

Easy solution, create a human intelligence task distribution system, have every university that has access participate, assign lab students to perform the HIT of downloading the document. Voila problem solved.

After it's all been mined stop submitting to Elsvier.

First: it's very difficult to grok copyright issues from a one-sided, non-legal presentation. Settled case law means going to trial and often going through multiple appeals.

Second: as it stands, this looks more to be a contractual than copyright matter (Elsevier is contractually banning use of automated text processing by subscribers), though it might possibly attempt to put teeth into this by asserting copyright. The remedy sought by Elsevier would be not to allege infringement, but to cancel future subscriptions. It might be nice for, say, a large collection of institutions to call Elsevier's bluff.

Third: Copyright law as it exists (and particularly in the US where I understand it reasonably well) is very mechanical: it governs the making of copies of an expressive work. Copyright does NOT govern facts, it does not apply to works which are not expressive, it does not apply to works which are functional in nature.

The real test here would be to put this (and possibly other) contract claims to test in a court. Unfortunately, contracts are governed (in the US) under state, not federal law, and while there's some uniformity of language, it would probably take several such cases (and appeals to at least the Federal Circuit) to establish reasonable case law.

Otherwise, what's significant about this to me is that, once again, it's a case far less about the availability and copying of information (journal articles are routinely copied), than it is about power and control within an information market. This is an area in which conventional economics is far too often lacking (though it's also an area in which much interesting work is starting to happen).

Good point, this is on the way. The problem is more to do it right, that is, you want for each "word" to detect if this is a word, a chemical formula or a SMILES. Then, if SMILES, you then need to canonicalize it and search.

Nothing very complicated, but it needs to be well done to be of any use.

Thanks for the feedback!