Last Friday was meeting number two of the Licences for Europe – a Stakeholder Dialogue, ‘Text & Data Mining’ Working Group 4.

The first meeting did not go well and this was widely reported. The potential of text & data mining (TDM) technology is enormous. The McKinsey Global Institute reckon that in Europe, government expenditure could be reduced by €100 billion a year if the legal barriers to TDM were relaxed.

Many content industry representatives seem keen to take a licence-based, negotiations and permissions-based approach to allowing (controlling?) TDM. We believe this is unnecessary – The Right To Read Is The Right To Mine, and that following a ‘yet more licencing’ pathway will ultimately stifle innovation. Instead we want the EU to follow the successful precedent set by the US, Japan, Israel, Taiwan and South Korea who enjoy a legal limitation and exception for such activities – the UK is also shortly to be added to this list too (come October this year when the Hargreaves Report recommendations become law).

Some who were at the first working group meeting regrettably could not afford to attend this meeting. It is expensive travelling to Brussels every month, and this structured dialogue is set to run for many months & meetings. But I was there to represent the point-of-view of academic research, and in doing so was only one of very few people in the room who actually had some experience with real TDM techniques. The presentation I gave is embedded below:

Slide 15 of my presentation elicited a strange response from one participant. I was (falsely) accused after my talk of mis-representing the Publishing Research Consortium’s own report on text & data mining.

The exact wording in the report on page 7 of the PDF is:
“When permission is requested, 35% of publisher respondents generally allows mining in all or the majority of cases” Smit & van der Graaf, 2011. Whilst on slide 15 of my presentation I wrote: “When permission is requested [by researchers], 35% of publisher respondents allow mining in the majority or all of cases” Do you see any significant difference in meaning? I certainly don’t.

Needless to say I kept my cool in rebutting the accusations and we clarified the matter amicably. The lamentably-low figure of 35% is truthful and speaks for itself sadly. Very few subscription-access journal publishers routinely allow TDM research on their copyrighted content and this is something that has to change in the future. Furthermore the permissions-based licencing approaches presented later in the meeting don’t accommodate the flexibility needed in research and may exclude unaffiliated scholars, retired scholars and even PhD students(!) – I have heard that only “employees” of higher education institutions would be allowed to perform TDM research on certain content. This is not a scenario we want for Europe.

At the next meeting we are hoping that the Commissioners will call for Prof. Ian Hargreaves himself or one of his team who helped him research and write his influential report on Intellectual Property and Growth to give a talk at the meeting and help us all to make informed decisions about the best ways in which to help & enable TDM techniques. The next meeting is in late April. I will report any further progress in this matter then.