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Monday, May 5, 2014

Text Mining: Elsevier Releases New Terms for Academe

Have you heard the phrase "Text & Data Mining," also referred to by the term TDM? Here in the University Libraries we now have two major efforts to bring state-of-the-art analysis tools and techniques to the study of all types of research materials - from the works of Shakespeare to mapping social trends and more. The USpatial project involves many departments here on campus and focuses on making more tools available to allow for analysis in ways not possible before today's technologies. the DASH project - Digital Arts, Science + Humanities - "emerging digital tools and methodologies for scholarly, pedagogical, and artistic projects."

One essential ingredient to this type of research is the availability of text to mine for information and facts. Elsevier, one of the largest (and private) academic publishers has been a tough nut to crack for getting data; however, they now have new terms and this article that I wrote for Information Today's NewsBreaks gives you an overview of the new stipulations required if you would want to mine the texts of articles from their proprietary archives.

SO... you work for a university and do research on the clock. You write it up and the for-profit journal gets to assert ownership of your works and makes other researchers have to go through bizarre processes in order to use the articles...........Libraries are working hard with our academic partners to change this broken paradigm and free information from the DRM-crazed private sector. But, that's another story.

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