Outrage: Repurposing Open Access material is allowed without explicit permission

“So what can we do now to help making connections between papers and molecules? Peter Corbett, who works with Peter Murray Rust, is working on automated methods of getting computers to read chemistry papers and output semantic markup of them. “
AW> Over at ChemSpider we are working with Will Griffiths who developed ChemRefer . We have already extracted 10s of thousands of chemical names and will be linking them up to ChemSpider structures to enable Open Access papers to be structure/substructure searchable. However, we’ve hit a bit of a hurdle…more details on this will follow shortly but we have been asked to remove thousands of articles indexed according to what we believe is a standard search engine policy from the ChemRefer index. During our conversation today with the publisher the conversion of chemical names to chemical structures to provide a structure searchable index of the articles was deemed to be “re-purposing” of the Open Access articles and is NOT allowable. Peter Corbett and Peter Murray Rust are engaged in similar activities so will likely run into the same challenges. If they manage to get around this issue with this and other publishers then they will be working in a “permissive” role where they will need to get permission from publishers to perform semantic markup. Their semantic markup is also “re-purposing”. The “permissive challenge” is far away from Peter’s stance in terms of Open Data for all.

PMR: This makes no sense at all. As I understand it Chemrefer indexes Open Access chemistry articles (I did a brief search and verified that there were no articles from ACS, RSC. Wiley, Elsevier and all those other publishers who help scientific communication by closing information). So I assume the target journals or papers are labelled Open Access in some way.

Open access is epitomised by the BBB declarations – here is the Budapest Open Access Initiative one:

By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.