Eighteen European research and library organisations, including LIBER, have called on STM publisher Elsevier to withdraw its current policy on text and data mining (TDM). The organisations have laid out their request in an open letter to Michiel Kolman, Senior VP Global Academic Relations at the academic publishing company.
According to the organisations, Elsevier's current TDM policy places unnecessary restrictions on researchers. It limits their ability, and their right, to mine content to which they have legal access.
TDM allows researchers to derive information from articles and datasets by seeking patterns in text and data, including the use of robots to 'crawl' through information directly. It enables rapid searches of vast quantities of text and data to produce new discoveries and analyses that individual readers could not achieve, but in order to be most effective it will require the agreement of new protocols, and the renegotiation of access restrictions.
In this letter the organisations outline some of the ways in which the Elsevier policy restricts researchers' abilities to perform TDM by requiring them to register their details and agree to a click-through license that can change at any time, and how it unfairly mandates conditions by which research outputs derived from TDM can be disseminated.
The signatories are: LIBER Europe, ADBU, CRISTIN, CSUC, EBLIDA, ENCES, FinELib Consortium, Finnish Research Library Association (STKS), IFLA, LATABA Library Association of Latvia, LERU, Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, Portuguese Association of Librarians, Archivists and Documentalists, REBIUN, Research Libraries UK, SPARC Europe and Wellcome Trust.
