Text mining: what do publishers have against this hi-tech research tool?

Researchers push for end to publishers' default ban on computer scanning of tens of thousands of papers to find links between genes and diseasesProfessor Peter Murray-Rust was looking for new ways to make better drugs. Dr Heather Piwowar wanted to track how scientific papers were cited and shared by researchers around the world. Dr Casey Bergman wanted to create a way for busy doctors and scientists to quickly navigate the latest research in genetics, to help them treat patients and further their research.All of them needed access to tens of thousands of research papers at once, so they could use computers to look for unseen patterns and associations across the millions of words in the articles. This technique, called text mining, is a vital 21st-century research method. It uses powerful computers to find links between drugs and side effects, or genes and diseases, that are hidden within the vast scientific literature. These are discoveries that a person scouring through papers one by one may never notice. Continue reading...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Peer review and scientific publishing Research Science Higher education Technology University of Cambridge University of Manchester Intellectual property Books UK news Open access scientific publishing Source Type: news