Text and Data Mining: practical aspects of licensing and legal aspects

Alistair Tebbit

Text and Data Mining: international perspectives, licensing and legal aspects was a Journals Publisher Forum seminar organised in conjunction with ALPSP, the Publishers Association and STM held earlier this week in London. This is the second in a series of posts summarising discussions.

Alistair Tebbit, Government Affairs Manager at Reed Elsevier, outlined his company's view on evolving publishers’ solutions in the STM sector. Elsevier have text mining licenses with higher education and research institutions, corporates and app developers. They give access to text miners through transfer of content to user’s system enabled by one of two delivery mechanisms under a separate licence: via API or using ConSyn. The delivery mechanisms have been set up and there are running costs. Their policy to date has been to charge the value add to the services to users for commercial organisations, but not academic.

Why is content delivery managed this way? Platform stability is a critical reason. Data miners want content at scale – they generally don’t do TDM on a couple of articles - but delivering scale via their main platform ScienceDirect.com is sub-optimal. APIs or ConSyn are the solution as they leave ScienceDirect untouched. Effectively they are separating machine-to-machine traffic from traffic created by real users going to ScienceDirect.com. Content security is another key issue. Free-for-all access to miners on ScienceDirect would not allow bona fide users to be checked. XML versions are less susceptible to piracy than PDFs. Why is content delivery managed this way? It’s more efficient for genuine text miners. Most miners prefer to work off XML, not from article versions on ScienceDirect. Their delivery mechanisms put the content into data miners' hands fast.

With text and data mining outputs, they use a CC BY-NC licence when redistributing results of text mining in a research support or other non-commercial tool. They require that the DOI link back to the mined article whenever feasible when displaying extracted content. They grant permission to use snippets around extracted entities to allow context when presenting results, up to a maximum of 200 characters or one complete sentence.

Licensing is working well at Elsevier and will improve further. The demand to mine is being met and there are no extra charges in the vast majority of cases. Additional services to support mining will likely be offered as they improve. However, it’s early days. Mining demand is embryonic with low numbers at the moment. Copyright exceptions are a big cause for concern and there is a major risk of spike in unauthorized redistribution. Platform stability may be threatened and there is a risk of a chilling effect on future service innovation.

Duncan Campbell

Duncan Campbell, Associate Director for Journal Digital Licensing at Wiley-Blackwell, provided an overview of emerging solutions in text and data mining with a publisher perspective on intermediary solutions. Text and data mining is important to publishers as it enriches published content, adds value for customers and aids development of new products. For researchers it helps identify new hypotheses, discover new patterns, facts and knowledge. For corporate research and development, the benefits are as above and in addition it accelerates drug discovery and development and maximises the value of information spend.

There are a number of barriers to text and data mining:

• Access: how can users get hold of content for text mining
• Content formats: there is no standard cross-publisher format
• Evaluation: understanding user needs and use cases
• Uncertainty: what is allowed by law, what is the use of text and data mining output
• Business models: lack of business pricing models e.g. access to unsubscribed content
• Scale: define and manage demand, bilaterial licensing unlikely to be scalable.

There is a potential role for intermediary to help with publisher/end user relationship. This could include as a single point of access and delivery; by providing standard licensing terms as well as speed and ease of access. The intermediary may make mining extensible and scalable and they can cover the long tail of publishers and end-users. It also enables confidential access, especially in pharma.

Andrew Hughes

Andrew Hughes, Commercial Director at the Newspaper Licensing Agency (NLA), provided a different perspective on text and data mining. Text mining requires copying of all data to establish data patterns and connections and computers need to index data. Every word on every page has to be copied. Once the copy exists, it needs to be managed. Copying requires access to data so that indexing can only happen on either the publisher database, but there is a risk of damage and disruption unless managed, and expense; or copy provided to text minders’ database where there are costs and control risks for publishers. He believes that you also need to bear in mind that third party licence partners aren’t always as careful with your data as you are.

In the newspaper sector, press packs are produced by text mining. The NLA eClips is a service where the proprietary way of mining content is withheld and a PDF is supplied of the relevant articles. There are substantial risks for publishers in text mining including the potential for technical errors by miners, challenges around data integrity and commercial malpractice. There are also cost implications including the technical loads on systems, management of copies and uses and opportunity costs.

Hughes cited the Meltwater case where the industry had to tackle the unauthorised use of text and data mining for commercial use. It took a lot of time and litigation, but they are now thriving within the NLA rules. They are licensed by the NLA and their users are licensed. It means they are operating on fair and equal terms with competitors and is an example of how licenses can work to the benefit of all parties.

Text and Data Mining: International Perspectives, Licensing and Legal Aspects

Graham Taylor welcomes delegates

Licensing for text and data mining is a minefield for publishers. How do you use the technology? What are the implications of policy development in Europe and internationally? How do you ensure that your licenses are fair and practical?

Text and Data Mining: international perspectives, licensing and legal aspects, a Journals Publishers Forum seminar organised in conjunction with ALPSP, the Publishers Association and STM, gathered together a range of speakers to try and answer these questions. This is the first in a series of posts from the afternoon that provides a summary of the discussion.

Graham Taylor, founder of The Long Game consultancy and director of both the CLA and PLS, kicked off proceedings with a summary of text and data mining. It has been something of a political hot potato, but has recently settled down. He introduced Jonathan Clark from Jonathan Clark & Partners B.V., author of Text Mining and Scholarly Publishing report from PRC, who provided an overview of the 'What, Why and How?' of text and data mining.

Text mining is about mining or extracting the meaning from one or many articles. Sounds a lot like reading, right? Yes, but it's about a machine doing it. If you imagine that you were teaching a machine to read, how would you do it? You can provide formalised rules of grammar and language and teach the machine to read. The other way is a statistical, rule based approach. This is where you take as much text as is possible and tell it to read. Amazingly, machines do make up the rules and start to make sense of it. The best example is Google Translate. It achieves this by sitting on a vast amount of translated content that it searches to match particular phrases. Why is this important? Think of the way that scholarly communication is done and how it is structured. It is essentially to share facts and to shape opinions from them. Data mining is pretty much the domain of machines where you look for patterns and trends.

Why do text mining?

1. Getting the facts out of the article, making them sensible and enhancing the text.
2. Systematic literature review: machine reading faster and more of it than humans could ever do, and probably more accurately as well.
3. Discovery: he referenced brainmap.org - completed manually and has become very important resource for researchers on brain scanning since)
4. Computational linguistics research: the new rules about making research available

Eefke Smit is Director of Standards and Technology for STM and co-authored a study on Journal Article Mining on behalf of the Publishing Research Consortium. Historically there has been a mix of optimists and pessimists in text and data mining (TDM). 

The sceptics claim:

• TDM has always over-promised
• It is only in specialised fields
• The tools are still complicated
• It needs manual curation
• There are high investments
• It is domain dependent
• There is no common dictionary
• Subject to over ambition in the promise of knowledge discovery.

However, the optimists counter that:

• There is a vast digital corpus available and growing
• It has more and more application areas (business, legal, social, etc)
• The tools are improving fast
• Manual work is reduced
• It can be public domain or domain precision
• Processing power is less of a problem, analytical tools are better, visualisation adds to analysis.

There are some interesting insights into exactly how publishers approach text and data mining in the report as well as insight into what drives the requests. The third part of the report focused on cross-sector solutions to facilitate content mining better. Suggestions made by experts during the interviews included:

1. standardization of content formats
2. one content mining platform
3. commonly agreed access terms
4. one window for mining permissions
5. collaboration with national libraries

It was interesting to note that most of the interviewed experts did not see open access as a related issue; access issues relate to datafile delivery or mining on the platform itself.

Richard Mollet on the latest policy

Richard Mollet, Chief Executive of the Publishers Association provided what he described as an 'aide memoir' of how the policy is tracking in the UK and the EU. Since Hargreaves report in 2011, and the UK Government's subsequent acceptance of all the recommendations, the Intellectual Property Office has been tasked with taking this forward. There is a proposed 'three step test' for text and data mining which will allow copying for purpose of analytic techniques. The caveats are: 

1. the person already has a right to access under an existing agreement, NOT the ability to access;
2. for sole purpose of non-commercial research; 
3. the license may impose conditions of access to licenses or third party system (this allows the publisher to impose some restrictions to avoid degrading the whole system, for maintenance of some form of control).

There is a tension between the challenge of being able to do what is legal under copyright law, but when that is then prevented by a contract. This has made the translation from policy document to parliamentary language even more difficult and has hence been delayed. Due to this, but it's likely that this won't be UK legislation until October 2014.

In parallel, the European Commission has come to that view itself. There are stakeholder dialogue working groups that are trying to identify short term wins. One of these is on data and text mining: trying to ascertain does anyone want to do it and if so how do they want to do it. However, there are real tensions within the Commission with different positions between rights-holder communities who feel they can fix this, with significant work already underway, and the research community that believe the system is broken and needs a complete overhaul. The risk here is that it will move from dialogue to monologue, as researchers have indicated that any licensing solution - as opposed to the reopening of the Copyright Directive - will be insufficient for their purposes. 

Kathy Law on Outsourcing: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Kathy Law is a publishing professional with over 30 years' experience in both sales and distribution roles, most recently in business development and publication management at MPS and HighWire Press. She is a member of ALPSP's Professional Development Committee and is a co-opted member of the main Council.

Here, she reflects on the challenges publishers face when outsourcing all or part of their activity.

"For many organisations, outsourcing is not a daily event, but is a major shift for the organisation that can be fraught with potholes for the unwary or unprepared. There is the sense of losing control, where work is not done the way you normally do it. Sometimes, it can seem difficult to get your message or instructions across. And what do you do when you aren't getting the right results?

Poorly defined work specifications and unrealistic expectations about who does what and how much often lead to vendors not delivering what you expected. Confusion over how the outsourced activity will be managed can contribute to an unsatisfactory, and potentially costly outcome.

Sometimes it pays to take a step back and look at the challenges, good practices and pitfalls around outsourcing. There are many functions that can be outsourced. Ask yourself the following:

• Are you going to just outsource the ubiquitous typesetting scenarios? This is a hugely important area and probably the first thing to get outsourced by a publisher. 
• Are you interested in outsourcing sales and marketing functions? 
• What about hosting, content enhancement and conversion? 
• And let's not forget copy editing, proofreading and other editorial functions. 

There is much to learn from talking through your outsourcing with a range of potential vendors and other publishers. The more insight you gain into what can go right or wrong - the good, the bad, and the ugly - the more likely you'll be able to be make sound decisions when selecting and working with your supplier.

Don't forget that it's not just a straight transactional relationship, there are also valuable insights to be had on handling cultural differences. Crucially, think about how outsourcing can be turned into a benefit for your publishing activity by allowing you to re-focus affected staff into positive channels of other activity.

In my experience, the more thought that goes into these areas, the more positive and successful the outsourcing relationship will be."

Kathy will be sharing her experience at the ALPSP seminar Outsourcing: the good, the bad and the ugly on 12 June in London. Book your ticket now.

SAGE sponsors the ALPSP International Conference Travel Grant

This month SAGE has announced they will again sponsor a librarian place at this year's Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) International conference. The annual event takes place this year from Wednesday 11 to Friday 13 September 2013 in Birmingham, United Kingdom.

SAGE has supported the ALPSP conference as a sponsor since its launch in 2008. This is the third year SAGE has supported a librarian travel grant at the event, which provides a free place at the conference for a librarian or information professional, including entry to the ALPSP awards dinner, travel within the UK, and accommodation for one person.

The ALPSP Conference has become a pivotal conference for understanding changes faced by both librarians and publishers and how we should work together, providing an engaging environment for open dialogue. The winner of the 2012 travel grant, Stephen Buck, E-Resources and Periodicals Librarian at Dublin City University Library said, "I was a delighted to be given the ALPSP award last year. It was a great opportunity to broaden my exposure to, and awareness of, the issues affecting publishers and their relationships with libraries and to provide an enhanced perspective on relevant themes that have helped facilitate the generation of ideas and building of expertise moving forwards.” His full post on his experience of the conference can be found here.

SAGE is running a competition to win the sponsored place, with entries submitted either via email or via Twitter to @SAGELibraryNews. To enter, librarians must answer the following question in 140 characters or less:

“What would be your top tip to give students about conducting research?”

In an environment where both the education and research landscapes are rapidly evolving, it is increasingly important that both librarians and publishers work together to support the dissemination of knowledge.

A selection of the responses received will be posted on SAGE Connection later in the year.

Completed answers should be sent to @SAGElibraryNews tagged with #ALPSP or by email to events@sagepub.co.uk. The closing date is Friday 24th May.

See here for further details. For more information about the conference please visit www.alpspconference.org

Safe Harbour offers clear rules for use of out-of-commerce works: trade associations agree safe harbour provisions

In September 2011, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed in the presence of the EU Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services (Michel Barnier), which set out the principles on the digitisation and making available of out-of-commerce (OOC) works, by publicly accessible libraries and similar institutions in the EU.

The principles recommend that potential users of such out-of-commerce works essentially adhere to an Extended Collective Licensing Scheme, which involves rights holder Collective Management Organisations granting specific licences for the use of such works, following appropriate diligent search for in-commerce formats, and consultation and agreement with the relevant rights holder groups.

The International Association of STM Publishers (STM), the Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division (PSP) of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and The Association of Learned and Professional Scholarly Publishers (ALPSP) have released a safe harbour provisions statement regarding the use of OOC works under the MoU.

The safe harbour provision provides additional clarity and certainty for users who participate in digitisation and reuse of works under such schemes in EU member states.

The full MOU and Key Principles are available to download. Read the Safe Harbour provisions from STM, AAP/PSP and ALPSP statement here.

A number of publishers have already signed up to the safe harbour provisions.  If you wish to do so, please contact Kim Beadle at STM (beadle@stm-assoc.org).  Please note that this is not solely for those who publish in the area of STM, but open to all scholarly publishers.

A guide to accessible publishing - what, why and how?

It might not be obvious but digital workflows are a great gift to disabled people and, likewise, disabled people are great gift for digital publishing. But it doesn't always seem that way, so let's explore the issues.

Alistair McNaught (JiscTechDis) and Sarah Hilderley (EDItEUR) have written a new advice note for ALPSP Members: A guide to Accessible Publishing.

This topic will be explored further at the ALPSP International Conference in September when Huw Alexander (SAGE) will be chairing the session Accessibility - are you missing a strong market for your content. Drawing together some of the key players within the sector, the speakers will seek to unpack the issues experienced by publishers, users and institutions and map out how publishers can develop their online products to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible. The session will examine the issues from various viewpoints and provide practical advice and opportunities for discussion.  See www.alpspconference.org for further information about the conference programme and registration.

What next for data analysis? Notes from the London Book Fair 2013

The panel line up for questions

What next for data analysis? A scholarly publisher's guide was a seminar organised by ALPSP at this year's London Book Fair. The panel discussed the importance of researchers sharing data, how it benefits the public as well as advancing disciplines, and how a reward system is needed around publishing sharing data. Encouragingly, it's clear that publishers have an important role to play.

The problem with not sharing

Lee-Ann Coleman, Head of Scientific, Technical and Medical Information at the British Library, chaired the session. She has particular insight into the use of data by researchers having worked on both the DRYAD project and currently DataCite. There are a number of challenges sharing data amongst researchers. Coleman acknowledged that publishers have been helpful by requiring this, but this is not standard practice. The lack of sharing can be a real problem, particularly in public health or multidisciplinary areas. A maximum return on sharing data is not realised by the current system despite a focus on open data from policy makers and organisations such as the Royal Society.

Lee-Ann Coleman kicks off the session

The lack of a system to store, cite or link research data is the reason why the DataCite project was established in 2009. DataCite comprises full and associate members organisations, enabling them to assign Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to submitted data sets to support finding, accessing and reusing the data.

Read more about DataCite here.

What practical challenges do publishers face in making data open?

Phil Hurst is Publisher at The Royal Society who published a research report Science as an open enterprise in 2012. It highlighted the need to deal with the deluge of data, to exploit it for the benefit of the development of science, and the need to preserve the principle of openness. Hurst asserted that before you can analyse data, you need to open it up. Why bother? A recent outbreak of E. coli was a classic case study of how open, shared data helped to quickly control an outbreak of a deadly virus.

The report highlights the power of opening up data for science and provides a vision of all scientific literature online. The Royal Society makes sharing data a condition of publication. The data should go into a repository where it can be linked to it. Being practical, it is still early days for this. Hurst observed that you need to identify suitable repositories, establish appropriate criteria and share a list to guide authors. One repository they are working with is DRYAD.

Phil Hurst and a nasty strain of E. coli

The Society has amended licences to allow text and data mining and work with partners to facilitate. Challenges to take into account include how to manage access control for text and data mining purposes There are differences between subjects and varying degrees of willingness to share across the spectrum of science. Sharing data allows analysts to conduct meta analyses, modelling and data and text mining; and ultimately, enables scientists get new scientific value from content.

Developing taxonomies to track and map data

Richard Kidd, Business Development Manager for the Strategic Innovation Group at the Royal Society of Chemistry, outlined how they had approached data analysis at the RSC by using topic modelling to determine a set of true topics. They identified/invented 12 broad subjects which then generated 100+ categories. These were narrowed down and then mapped to existing categories.

Richard Kidd from the RSC in action

The 12 general categories and 120 or so sub-categories enable them to map new content. As a result, as their publishing output shifts, they can continue to track and map its evolution. This taxonomy provides a navigation aid for journals. It also works across other books, magazines and educational content. This provides sales opportunities for subject-specific focused customers.


They are now looking at data in their publications and patterns in data for sub-domains and hope that this approach will allow them to look at their back list and bring back the original data points.

Chemists don't have a community norm about sharing with a  laboratory group culture. There is a lack of available standards and issues about releasing data when patents could be developed. This leads to a more protective culture in relation to research data that can be at odds with open data principles. However, the RSC will be operating the EPSRC National Chemical Database, a domain repository for chemical sciences. Use and reuse is a priority with data availability feeds especially.

The rise of the 'meta journal'

Brian Hole of open access publisher Ubiquity Press outlined how researchers’ needs drive their publishing efforts. The model they use encourages researchers to share data. Hole is a strong proponent of what he calls the social contract of science and considers not only publication of research but also research data to be an essential part of it. As a result an author’s conclusions can be validated and their work more efficiently built upon by the research community. On the other hand it is effectively scientific malpractice to withhold data from the community. He argues that this principle applies to publishers, librarians and repositories as well as researchers.

Brian Hole from Ubiquity Press

Benefits of sharing data cut across different interest groups. Researchers want recognition in the form of citations, and those who share data tend to receive more citations, and potential for career advancement. This in turn makes data easier to find and use in future studies which is more data efficient. Shared data can be used in teaching to improve the learning experience.  For the public, if it is easier to find data, it can help build public trust in science. There are also potential economic benefits for the private sector to drive innovation and product development He believes that there are many disciplines that are yet to benefit, especially in the humanities.

Ubiquity Press are developing 'metajournals' to aid in discovery of research outputs scattered throughout the world in different repository silos, and also to provide incentives for researchers to openly share their data according to best practices. The metajournals provide researchers with citable publications for their data or software, which are then referenced by other researchers in articles and books. The citations are the tracked along with the public impact of papers (using altmetrics). The platform so far includes metajournals in public health, psychology, archaeology and research software, with more to come including economics and history. Read more about Ubiquity Press' meta journals here.

If you are interested in data, join us at the ALPSP Conference this September to hear Fiona Murphy from Wiley and a panel of industry specialists discuss Data: Not the why, but the how (and then what?). Book online by 14 June to secure the early bird rate.