Nature Publishing Group (NPG) will explicitly permit academic reuse of archived author manuscripts. Head of Content Licensing David Hoole announced the development today at the OAI6 meeting in Geneva, Switzerland. Researchers can now data-mine and text-mine author manuscripts from NPG journals archived in PubMed Central and other academic repositories.
"NPG supports reuse for academic purposes of the content we publish. We want the excellent research that we publish to help further discovery, and recognize that data-mining and text-mining are important aspects of that," said David Hoole.
Under NPG's terms of reuse, users may view, print, copy, download and text and data-mine the content for the purposes of academic research. Re-use should only be for academic purposes, commercial reuse is not permitted. Full conditions are available [here].
The re-use permissions apply to author manuscripts, of articles published in NPG's journals, which have been archived in PubMed Central, UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) and other institutional and subject repositories. The terms were developed in consultation with the Wellcome Trust, the leading biomedical research charity....
"The Wellcome Trust is supportive of NPG's efforts to make archived content more reusable," said Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust. "This is an important development because it shows that reuse can be facilitated, independent of business model, for text-mining and academic research." ...
NPG's re-use terms will be included in the metadata of these archived manuscripts.
This development is the next step in NPG's support for self-archiving. NPG's License to Publish encourages authors of original research articles to self-archive the accepted version of their manuscript, for public access six months after publication.
Forty-three journals published by NPG offer a free Manuscript Deposition Service to help authors fulfil funder and institutional mandates for public access....
NPG is currently working with partners to expand this to other repositories using the SWORD protocol.
Comment. OA supporters have disagreed on whether text-mining is covered by fair use (or fair dealing etc.) or whether it requires fresh permission. Regardless of where you came down on that, it's good to have explicit permission. (On the other hand, if permission is unnecessary, then it wouldn't be good if researchers and publishers began to believe that it was; but that's a different issue.) I regard this as a small but welcome step beyond gratis green OA to libre green OA.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/18/2009 11:26:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
