Elsevier Opens Its Papers To Text-Mining 52
ananyo writes "Publishing giant Elsevier says that it has now made it easy for scientists to extract facts and data computationally from its more than 11 million online research papers. Other publishers are likely to follow suit this year, lowering barriers to the computer-based research technique. But some scientists object that even as publishers roll out improved technical infrastructure and allow greater access, they are exerting tight legal controls over the way text-mining is done. Under the arrangements, announced on 26 January at the American Library Association conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, researchers at academic institutions can use Elsevier's online interface (API) to batch-download documents in computer-readable XML format. Elsevier has chosen to provisionally limit researchers to 10,000 articles per week. These can be freely mined — so long as the researchers, or their institutions, sign a legal agreement. The deal includes conditions: for instance, that researchers may publish the products of their text-mining work only under a license that restricts use to non-commercial purposes, can include only snippets (of up to 200 characters) of the original text, and must include links to original content."
Re:If the Internet is killing Newspapers (Score:4, Informative)
Because news or "news" [1] can be gotten for free on the Internet while peer reviewed scientific papers is a bit harder. My experience is that quite some sites bait Google search results (see my earlier post; you google for pdfs but end up on a landing page which allows you to buy one time access for 30+ USD for a handful of pages). My successful workaround (so far) has been contacting one of the authors for a copy (for personal study).
[1] a lot of people don't seem to care if it's made up or not