At Oxford last week Bob Campbell of Wiley said that if anyone wished to text-mine content in Wiley journals all they had to do is ask.
Thank you Bob! This is a formal request from scientists in:
Dear Bob Campbell,
We were at the meeting last week in Oxford on the “Evolution of Scholarship” where you stated that anyone could mine content in Wiley journals for factual information, and re-use and republish it. Cambridge subscribes to many Wiley journals and I and many other scientists wish to mine factual information using machines.
We cannot do this at present as Wiley imposes two barriers:
- legal restrictions of text-mining through contracts (Wiley has in the past threatened scientists with legal action for extracting facts)
- Wiley’s server-side robots which will shut off the University if we attempt to download publications automatically.
I would therefore like you (immediately, as we wish to start immediately) to confirm that Wiley will absolutely and for ever allow subscribers, at no additional cost, to mine all content for facts in both back issues and current publications as soon as they appear.
Answeriing “YES” to this question is all that is required. Any other answer, including the request for discussion will be taken as “NO”. Please reply by the end of today (2012-03-07).
I have published a background document (/pmr/2012/03/04/information-mining-and-hargreaves-i-set-out-the-absolute-rights-for-readers-non-negotiable/ ) which also gives a wide range of illustrations of factual information. In places it reads “Elsevier”, please substitute “Wiley”.
Please note that we do not need any help from Wiley in systematically downloading papers. We shall use a delay of 1 second between downloads and we shall not re-publish verbatim the papers we download.
Thank you and I look forward to your immediately reply and agreement.
Note that we want to get started tomorrow! There are lots of projects – today I’ll be working with physicists and putting in place the systems to start immediately Wiley gives the go-ahead. But it will also be useful for bioinformaticians, economists, chemists, and lots more I collaborate with.