mining and rights

["James J. O'Donnell" <jod@georgetown.edu>]

Joe Esposito's inquiry -- I would be very interested to hear 
comment from publishers -- about the licensing issues raised by 
wanting to use large databases of journal articles for data 
mining connects with something in an interview with Cliff Lynch 
in the May/June Educause Review.  Excerpts:

 "We now have about fifty years of investment in text analysis
 and text mining.  THe intelligence community is still spending
 heavily on these technologies, and industry is getting very
 interested for lots of reasons.  For example, I'm told that the
 pharmaceutical industry is very interested in computational
 mining of the biomedical literature base.  This is an important
 part of what is at stake in these massive digitization programs.
 Are we going to be able simply to read the digitized works, or
 are we going to be able to compute on them at scale as well?
 (Presumably, Google will be able to compute on everything it
 digitizes, even the in-copyright works.  Almost nobody seems to
 have figured this out yet!  What an amazing and unique resource.
 It's not clear what the academy broadly will be able to compute
 on.)  The answer will make a big difference for the future of
 scholarship.  This move to computation on text corpora is going
 to have vast implications that we haven't even thought about yet
 -- implications for copyright, implications for publishers,
 implications for research groups.  In fact, it may represent the
 point of ultimate meltdown for copyright as we know it today."

Leaving aside the undoubted substantial potential -- are there 
any indications that mining issues are affecting the way 
publishers are granting or withholding access to material?

Jim O'Donnell
Georgetown U.