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:Google spamming (Score:4, Interesting)
Several sites that have pay walled PDFs somehow manage to get the contents of those PDFs crawled by Google (probably others as well). Google has rules against this, but somehow those sites get away with this. E.g. if one googles for "some keywords filetype:pdf" (without the quotes) results Google show might give the impression that that the full PDF is available but when clicking one lands on a HTML page which shows the abstract and a "buy this document" link. Access is in the 30+ USD range, so about 2 USD/page or more... One of those sites is Elsevier. Or at least was, can't find an example.
When this happens to me, I contact one of the authors and end up with the paper anyway, for free, most of the time.
Another parasite is scribd.