Reproducibility

National governments are also weighing in on the issue. The UK government aims this April to make text-mining for non-commercial purposes exempt from copyright, allowing academics to mine any content they have paid for.

“Our plan is just to wait for the copyright exemption to come into law in the United Kingdom so we can do our own content-mining our own way, on our own platform, with our own tools,” says Mounce. “Our project plans to mine Elsevier’s content, but we neither want nor need the restricted service they are announcing here.”

some researchers feel that a dangerous precedent is being set. They argue that publishers wrongly characterize text-mining as an activity that requires extra rights to be granted by licence from a copyright holder, and they feel that computational reading should require no more permission than human reading. “The right to read is the right to mine,” says Ross Mounce of the University of Bath, UK, who is using content-mining to construct maps of species’ evolutionary relationships.

In a Literary Lab project on 18th-century novels, English students study a database of nearly 2,000 early books to tease out when “romances,” “tales” and “histories” first emerged as novels, and what the different terms signified.