FLICKR, ROBERT CUDMOREResearchers are increasingly keen to use computer programs that scour the text of thousands of scientific papers, a method known as text-mining, but publishers tend to block such programs. The resulting disagreements are coming to a head, reported Nature, with the European Union set to rule on the legality of text-mining, and researchers and publishers discussing the terms by which the method can be used.
“Data- and text-mining techniques . . . could hold the key to the next medical breakthrough, if only we freed them from their current legal tangle,” Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission, told a Brussels intellectual-property summit last September, according to Nature.
Indeed, text-mining of the scientific literature has already proven useful. For example, Raul Rodriguez-Esteban, a computational biologist at drug company Boehringer Ingelheim in Connecticut, told Nature that he used the method to search roughly 23,000 articles to identify hundreds of proteins that ameliorate multiple sclerosis in a mouse model. He then identified other proteins that interacted with them to find potential drug targets.
But it can take years to negotiate agreements with publishers to trawl their content, if permission is granted at ...
