Publishing Research Consortium Study on Journal Article Mining

[kuta@stm-assoc.org]

20 June 2011

JAM today: the PRC Study on Journal Article Mining [1]

If you have too much to read, or too much information to digest, 
could a machine do it for you? That is the essence of the 
motivation behind content mining, here including both text and 
data mining, examined in the latest Publishing Research 
Consortium (PRC) [2] study.

Headline findings in the report, which draw upon expert 
interviews and a survey of opinion are:

*Content mining is about to accelerate, will expand into new 
areas and develop further into automated information extraction 
and relationship analysis

*The focus is shifting from the traditional life sciences 
(especially drug discovery) to the social sciences, humanities, 
business, marketing and even law

*A majority of respondents to the survey supported three common 
solutions for facilitating content mining

      **  More content standardization for mining-friendly formats
      **  A shared content mining platform across publishers
      **  Commonly agreed rules for the granting of mining
 	 permissions

*Third-party mining requests are received by most publishers (77% 
of all, 88% of large ones) but at a very low level (less than 10 
per annum); most mining requests come from abstracting and 
indexing services followed by corporate R&D organisations.

*Over 90 % of publisher respondents grant research-focused mining 
requests, nearly 60 % of these in all or the majority of cases. 
The request will be granted by 60% of publisher respondents in 
most or all cases if it creates traffic drivers to their sites 
but just over half of these publishers (51%) will refuse in all 
or most cases if the results of the mining would compete with 
their own services

*A majority of publishers do not see Open Access as a 
prerequisite for content mining

Eefke Smit, who carried out the research with Maurits van der 
Graaf, said "We found a lot of optimism for new opportunities in 
mining scholarly content among all stakeholder groups. Publishers 
expressed a clear intent to invest more in mining and new 
services that will reveal deeper levels of information. We can 
expect many more exciting developments in this area in the near 
future."

Bob Campbell (Chairman of the PRC Steering Group ) added:  "This 
comprehensive study shows that publishers understand the 
potential of text and data mining.  It demonstrates that many 
publishers grant permission for mining for research purposes. 
It is also understandable that many publishers are reluctant to 
allow mining if the outcome could replace or compete with their 
own services which can involve a considerable investment."

The report focuses on the state of content mining in the arena of 
academic and professional publications, journal articles in 
particular. Academic and professional publishers frequently 
receive requests from parties wishing to mine their content and 
face uncontrolled downloads or crawling. More and more publishers 
undertake content mining on their own journal content. This PRC 
study aims to provide more insight into practices, policies for 
permission requests, publishers' plans and possibilities to 
facilitate better content mining. In early 2011 the authors 
conducted 29 interviews with people involved in content mining 
projects and permission handling. During March and April of 2011 
a survey was mailed to all publishers on the mailing lists of 
CrossRef and the International Association of STM Publishers. The 
report analysis is based on 190 responses.

[1] Journal Article Mining, PRC Study. Freely available on the
PRC site

(http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/PRCSmitJAMreport20June2011VersionofRecord.pdf)

[2]About The Publishing Research Consortium (PRC):

The PRC is a group representing publishers and associations 
supporting global research into scholarly communication in order 
to enable evidence-based discussion and objective analysis 
(http://www.publishingresearch.net). PRC's objective is to 
support work that is scientific and pro-scholarship, in order to 
promote an understanding of the role of publishing and its impact 
on research and teaching.

Media Contact:
Bob Campbell, Publishing Research Consortium
Tel: +44 (0)1865 476118
bcampbel@wiley.com

Janice E. Kuta
Director of Membership & Marketing
STM - International Association of Scientific, Technical &
Medical Publishers
New York, New York 10003
E-mail: kuta@stm-assoc.org
Tel: 212-533-0832
www.stm-assoc.org