ALPSP Awards Spotlight on… RightFind™ XML for Mining from Copyright Clearance Center

In this second of the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing finalists' posts,
Jake Kelleher, Senior Director, Licensing and Business Development at Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) talks about RightFind™ XML for Mining, a solution which facilitates copyright-compliant access to full-text article content for text and data mining.

ALPSP: Tell us a bit about your company

CCC was founded over 35 years ago at the suggestion of the United States Congress to provide an efficient market for the clearing of photocopy rights. Today, CCC is a global leader in content and licensing solutions for publishers, businesses and academic institutions. Located near Boston, we have more than 380 employees dedicated to serving the needs of over 12,000 publishers and providing innovative content and rights-licensing technology solutions for more than 35,000 customers around the globe.

In the mid-90s, when publishers were struggling with how to best protect copyrighted material in a new online world, they worked closely with CCC to create RightsLink®, which made it easy for visitors to a publisher’s website to purchase permissions and other services. Years later, we collaborated with our publisher customers again to use RightsLink’s advanced ecommerce capabilities to manage article processing charges (APCs) and other author fees for journal articles. As a result, we launched our RightsLink for Open Access platform with a range of new capabilities developed with input from customers and partners. This summer, we introduced our new RightFind XML for Mining Service in partnership with six major publishers.

ALPSP: What is the project that you submitted for the Awards?

We submitted our latest advance, RightFind XML for Mining, a great example of CCC’s culture of innovation offering new revenue opportunities for life science publishers.

ALPSP: Tell us more about how it works and the team behind it

XML for Mining is built on the RightFind platform, CCC’s unique suite of cloud-based corporate workflow solutions that offer immediate access to a full range of STM peer-reviewed journal content.

XML for Mining launches from this platform and contains normalized, full-text articles from multiple rightsholders, allowing researchers to create a corpus of articles relevant to their research. Once the corpus has been created, researchers download these articles into their text mining solutions. XML for Mining almost eliminates the weeks, or even months, of work it takes to prepare scientific content for use in text mining solutions, thus accelerating research and discovery.

In fact, we recently received some very positive feedback from a leading international pharmaceutical company that they love the full-text search and can’t get it anywhere else. As always with CCC, feedback and ideas from our customers guide everything we do.   We developed RightFind XML for Mining with input from text mining researchers and publishers looking for a voluntary, market-based licensing solution.  And we will continue to listen to the market, add new publisher content and develop new features, and explore ways to collaborate with technology partners.

ALPSP: Why do you think it demonstrates publishing innovation?

RightFind XML for Mining represents a huge step forward for publishers navigating text and data mining waters. For these publishers, the solution has several key advantages. It enables end users to have access to aggregated article content from multiple rightsholders in a single service with normalized metadata, and that has never been done before. It offers a web-based, user-friendly interface, as well as a RESTful Application Programming Interface (API), so that researchers can easily identify and download, in full-text XML format, relevant articles for mining within their workflow.

It also reduces the necessity for time-consuming one-off licensing negotiations with publishers, along with the associated costs to administer, format and deliver custom content feeds to individual customers.  Moreover, our robust API enables integration with leading text and data mining software platforms.  Thus, publishers gain a new channel for their content along with valuable usage data, while users can reduce the number of operational steps involved with finding a needle in the haystack.

ALPSP: What are your plans for the future?

We create content workflow and licensing solutions that make copyright work for everyone. That means identifying and reducing pain points for publishers and their customers. RightFind XML for Mining reaffirms CCC’s role as an independent intermediary between content providers and users that can identify inefficiencies and create bridges between the two groups.  As publisher and market needs evolve, we will evolve our services, as well.

Jake Kelleher is Senior Director, Licensing and Business Development at Copyright Clearance Center. RightFind™ XML for Mining – Copyright Clearance Center’s text mining solution lets life sciences researchers move to a deeper level of discovery– beyond abstracts to direct access to full-text articles in XML format. XML for Mining saves time usually spent acquiring, licensing, and converting articles from individual publishers. Now, researchers can identify and download article collections from multiple publishers through a single, normalized source that is copyright-compliant.

The winner of the ALPSP Awards for Innovation in Publishing, sponsored by Publishing Technology, will be announced at the ALPSP Conference. Book now to secure your place.