Elsevier responds to my text mining request

UPDATE:  See follow-up post for new developments.  

Yesterday Elsevier responded to my text mining request.  David Tempest, Universal Access Team Leader, emailed a letter with proposed addendum licensing terms to me and my university librarian.  It has been clear to everyone that I am blogging these interactions — there was no request to keep the letter confidential, so I include it in full below.

Briefly:

• the agreement would permit some types of text mining of subscribed Elsevier content for authorized users in my university — a win, given that standard publisher contracts explicitly forbid all text mining.
• the agreement places full responsibility on my university itself to install and support “the text mining system”
• the agreement forbids releasing “all or any portion of the Subscribed Products… to anyone other than an Authorized User and other than as publishing the text mining results via scholarly communication.”

Here is the full letter from Elsevier (PDF).

What does this mean?  [UPDATE:  See follow-up post for new developments.  Elsevier has allowed the text-mining uses described below, and lightweight solutions in some cases]

1.  After negotiation, Elsevier permits the results of text mining to be included in scholarly communication, but does not permit text-mining over its literature for citizen science or research tools.  I explicitly asked Elsevier about these use cases (twice) and they have excluded them from their proposed agreement.  I did not develop these use cases as gotcha questions — they were existing plans for my real research, and they need text mining access.

2.  This took a really long time.  Not long compared to what some researcher have gone through for text mining access, but long!  And this is only for one publisher.  I guess I’d have to go through this again and again with Wiley and Springer and Nature and AAAS and all subscription publishers if I want text mining access to all the literature already covered by subscription agreements?

3.  It isn’t clear that my university can or will agree to these terms. My university probably doesn’t have the resources to install and maintain a text mining system.  I’m just a short-term postdoc with no grant funding for this: I can’t help support this infrastructure.  A researcher-driven solution I could handle myself.  The problem is that lightweight solutions aren’t allowed when content must be treated as a protected resource.

So.  That’s where it stands.  My university is reading the letter and deciding what to do.

I thank Elsevier for engaging with me on this.  I believe we both approached this in good faith.  Although these new contract terms will hopefully be useful to me and other researchers at UBC, I’m disappointed: I was hoping Elsevier would take this opportunity to work with me to experiment with new ways to support researchers building on top of the scholarly literature.

In contrast: You want to text mine Open Access content?  No problem.  It just works.  Ross Mounce carries PLoS full text around on a USB stick.

Let’s move to that kind of a publishing model now, please?  The kind of publishing model where the interests of publishers and researchers and research progress are all aligned.

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Some of the blogosphere reaction to my Part 1 post on this subject:

• comment thread
• Cameron Neylon
• Alicia Wise
• Ben Goldacre
• Ross Mounce
• Peter Murray-Rust
• Mike Taylor