Heather Piwowar's Slides Judson Dunham's Slides Teresa Lee's Slides
A passing tweet by co-presenter Heather Piwowar, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia, about her frustration with the limited number of Elsevier journals available for text mining led to surprising discussions with the publishing giant and a flurry of media attention. Text mining involves the automated search and compilation of huge volumes of textual data. Though invaluable for research, this technique is generally not permitted by library subscription licenses.
For the University of British Columbia, Piwowar’s advocacy of text mining and open science presented an unusual opportunity to actively partner with a researcher and library counsel to negotiate usage rights with a major publisher. At the time of writing, the Library was working with university counsel to draft terms that can be used as a model for text mining negotiations with other publishers. This issue also stimulated changes in Elsevier’s thinking, leading the publisher to undertake an extensive, top to bottom review of its text mining policies in response to this and other inquiries from researchers and customers.
The presenters will give an overview of text mining and its research application, provide the ‘back story’ of conversations amongst themselves and within their respective organizations, and engage participants in discussion of how emerging scholarly and research trends may change the business of library licensing, and beyond that, the researcher/library/publisher dynamic.
