A commentary on Sci-hub: 2/n. Why it matters to me and ContentMine

In my previous post , catalyzed by Sci-Hub, https://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2016/04/30/a-commentary-on-sci-hub-1-scholarly-publishing-is-broken/ I argued that scholarly publishing is completely broken. It’s now lost a huge amount of respect, it’s unwieldly, unfair and mired in bickering. It pays no attention to readers. It’s becoming a write-only system where authors write not to communicate but for glory – self advancement. There’s no clear political goal …

… and no clear technological goal.

And that’s the problem.

Because we desperately need the ability to search and analyze the scientific and medical literature in a 21stC manner.  While we’ve been creating our http://contentmine.org we’ve discovered many researchers who have to “read” 10,000 papers in a day or two. They use 20thC methods – click and read – taking weeks where they should take hours. ContentMine software (completely Open) has been built to solve this problem by filtering out the papers you don’t want – often 90% of the first search. (and it does much more – it can extract complex objects). It’s Open to everyone and it works (see previous posts).

When I came to Cambridge I had the vision of building an “artificially intelligent chemical reader” part of which was the  World_Wide_Molecular_Matrix a system for capturing and sharing versioned semantic chemistry. Bits of it are being built in ContentMine . I built systems where I could draw chemical formulae by speaking to the machine. We’ve built the de facto tool for chemical name recognition (OSCAR) and interpretation (OPSIN). I thought it would take 5 years to create my chemical amanuensis – scholarly assistant. With help from the publishers and scientists it probably would have. Now, after 15 years, it’s still a dream, frustrated by stagnant thinking on all sides, and deliberate opposition (e.g. nullifying European legislation).

So Stackoverflow, Github, Bitbucket, Apache, GNU, Jenkins, OuterCurve, Mozilla and many others are creating the human-machine technology of tomorrow. This encourages innovation from predictable and unpredictable sources. It works – it’s exciting and we are all part of it.

In contrast the Scholarly publishing industry has created nothing in the last 20 years. (The Scholarly Kitchen hailed the “big deal” (a pricing strategy to increase sales) as one of the greatest achievements of schol pub).

20 billion dollars per year – that’s 200 billion since I started at Cambridge – and nothing positive to show for it.

The current technology of the mainstream publishing industry is just awful. Really awful. It’s often built by outsourcing parts to people and companies who do not care how the result is used. The methods used – awful PDF and really awful HTML – are for the publisher’s convenience , not for the reader. And every publishers complains about how awful the tools are. They can’t change, they can’t innovate, they’re locked in. Add that every publisher feels they have to use a different technology to differentiate themselves from the others and it’s a complete tower of Babel. (I have spent 2 years of my life trying to solve this awful mess – and ContentMine can untangle a good deal.)

What’s even worse is that most of the publishers spend effort on STOPPING people reading the literature. The obstacles to getting to a paper grow every month. These include (from my own experience):

  • Deliberately bad PDFs.
  • Pixel maps rather than characters.
  • “Glass screens” that can’t be copied (Readcube from Nature/Springer).
  • Captchas to stop readers after 25 papers (Wiley, i.e. 400 Captchas for a literature review).
  • Monitoring every download and requiring libraries to stop researchers. (Elsevier, Wiley).
  • Automatically cutting off 200 universities for a single click (Amer. Chem Society).

Why does this matter?

Because there is so much we are missing out on. New medicinal knowledge, new ecology, new astronomy, materials, chemical reactions, … and innovation…

I should be able to ask a computer (in speech):

“Find me all chemical compounds that occur in Lantana species south of the Wallace line and compare their chemical and plant evolution. What types of compound might we see in the future, particularly due to invasive species?”

And get a result in minutes… it’s not as hard as it looks. It’s knowledge-driven science.

(Sadly All I WILL get in minutes is a cease-and-desist letter from publishers demanding that I shouldn’t “steal their content”.)

So because we cannot innovate in this area we are 20 years behind the mainstream.

So why do I want Sci-hub? (Note carefully that I haven’t said what I am going to do and, until I do, you cannot judge my intention. I haven’t said I’m going to use it. You’ll have to wait till the next blog post).

I want Sci-hub because it’s technically BETTER than anything else we have. Much better.

And it’s the perfect complement to ContentMine.

Sci-hub has all the world’s scientific knowledge in one logical place. It doesn’t matter that it’s spread over Torrents and other fragmentation – logically it’s all there. And it’s run by someone who knows what she’s doing technically – unlike many publisher sites. And, I assume, she and colleagues will be receptive to technical requests and suggestions. (No one has any chance of getting conventional publishes to innovate).

Using Sci-hub would advance my and ContentMine technology enormously. ContentMine and Sci-hub fit together perfectly – because they are both designed with the 21stC mentality. Because they react to what readers want. Yes, READERS; the marginalised community of scholarly publishing. 21stC projects create a community round them. They are organic and vibrant. They respect machines and humans equally.

ContentMine + Sci-hub could be the greatest search engine in scholarship, especially for science, technology and medicine. Because it’s semantic. Because all the literature is trivially accessible in one place and one format. I don’t know of anything that remotely comes close. We can search and index diagrams – extract 15 million chemical reactions a year. (Even if a publisher tried to develop it they could only use it on “their own” content.)

BUT! BUT! BUT!

But for many, including the law, Sci-hub is forbidden fruit.  Run by She-who-must-not-be-named. The arch-pirate. The criminal. (These terms are used). Peter Murray-Rust cannot use it (and I haven’t). ContentMine cannot mine it (and we won’t). We’ve looked at the legal and political aspects and I’ll analyse these in a subsequent post.

But 21stCCitizens – me, ContentMine, taxi-drivers really really want Sci-Hub.

The only things stopping us are copyright law, prosecutors and an intransigent, uncaring, out-of-touch, money-driven and self-seeking publisher-academic complex.

I’ll deal with the politico-legal in the next post.

 

Elsevier defends its value after Open Access disputes | The Bookseller

Not even the opening paragraph is OA. [Note that the paywall is from The Bookseller, not Elsevier.]

Update (May 3, 2016): The article is now OA. Excerpt: 

“Elsevier has sought to set aside public criticism of its Open Access (OA) and pricing policies and to restate its value for the academy, emphasising how, as a profit-generating company, it has the means to invest in innovation to serve researchers’ fast-changing needs.

The publisher’s record of success is clear: 2015 results from parent company RELX Group show Elsevier with operating profits of £760m on revenue of £2,070m, with underlying revenue growth of 2% and underlying profit up 3%. The prediction for 2016 is of further profit growth.  But public perceptions of Elsevier have been dogged by accusations of profiteering through excessive charges and reluctance to make its material available through OA, most notably from the online academic protest group The Cost of Knowledge (www.thecostofknowledge.com) which has racked up 16,000 signatories to its Elsevier boycott over five years.

Other widely aired disputes—a year-long deadlock with Dutch universities over institutional subscriptions; the departure of the entire editorial board of journal Lingua in 2015 in a row over OA—have added fuel to the fire for Elsevier’s critics. But director of access and policy Alicia Wise, vice-president of global corporate relations Tom Reller and policy director Gemma Hersh say criticism from a vocal minority is unrepresentative of the publisher’s regular contact with millions of researchers. The trio say that detractors obscure a key fact: that Elsevier is seeking to negotiate the new landscapes of OA and content-sharing in such a way that its economic sustainability, and therefore ability to maintain quality, is not compromised….”

 

Digital Solutions in India 2016: Unfolding the Next Chapter in Digital Content Proposition

“More publishers, especially those in the journals segment, are looking for highly automated fast-track workflows for handling large-volume multidisciplinary open access journals, Arora says….Reduced production costs, a shorter publishing cycle, and increased author involvement are the factors behind the creation of e2e, OKS Group’s cloud-based workflow platform…. “From a collaboration and cost standpoint, e2e is ideal for open access publishers,” Khanna says….”

Call for Contributions to the 8th Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing – OASPA

“The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, OASPA, is delighted to be holding the 8th Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing (COASP) in the US this year at the Westin Arlington Gateway hotel in Virginia, on the 21st and 22nd September 2016. Now established as a key event in the scholarly publishing calendar, COASP brings together the open access community and major stakeholders to discuss critical issues, developments, innovations, and best practices in the industry.  Further information on the event is available via our website.   As in previous years, the Program Committee have set aside one of the sessions within the conference program to provide six Show & Tell opportunities for showcasing new projects, ideas or initiatives relating to open access publishing.  Organisations are invited to submit a proposal to us for one of the six available 10 minute presentations. All proposals should be submitted by 31 May 2016 at the latest to info@oaspa.org.  The Program Committee will then review the suggestions by the end of June.  Please note that while we will be able to cover the registration costs for the authors of successful proposals, we are not able to cover any of the travel expenses that may be incurred in attending the conference …”

Open Professionals Education Network | Free support for U.S. Department of Labor TAACCCT grantees

OPEN is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and offers free services aligned with the DOL’s [US Department of Labor’s] grant requirements, designed to support your project. Our partners’ long-standing experience in beneficial service areas will help you achieve your project goals while maximizing the use of your resources.

Support areas include:

  • Open Educational Resources (OER) practices & policies
  • Creative Commons (CC) licensing
  • Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Accessibility
  • Evidence-based online technology use
  • Effective course and learning design
  • Help finding existing OER…”

A commentary on Sci-hub: 1. Scholarly publishing is broken

Many of you will already have read of Science Magazine’s account of Sci-Hub, the “pirate” site for scholarly publications. “Science” is often seen as one to the “top three” outlets, along with Nature and Cell. Here’s the original:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pirated-papers-everyone

And here’s a typical commentary which applauds the research in the article but criticizes the accompanying editorial showing that Science has an ethically flawed business model.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2016/04/science_magazine_can_t_defend_its_flawed_business_model.html

This (and following) blog is one of the most important I have written, and I shall choose words carefully. I shall include facts, opinions, and what I intend to do and not do, and why. I am always open to criticism and try to be polite and constructive. My message is already spreading to more than one posting. This one sets the scene.

This blog is nearly 10 years old. I’d like to believe that I have tried to help make scholarly publishing fit for the 21st Century (C21). I’ve seen Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of the semantic web for scholarship – I was there in CERN in 1994 – and it made sense then and even more so now. I (“I” includes many collaborators, but I use”I” to make it clear that the views here are mine and mine alone. Special Thanks to Henry Rzepa, my wonderful ex-group in Cambridge, Open Knowledge, ContentMine, Blue Obelisk, Crystallography Open Data Base (COD),  librarians in Cambridge and others. Please accept this pronoun).

I write and use Computer Programs.

  • I write programs and deposit them in Github/Apache/OuterCurve/BitBucket, etc.. People use them, build on them and acknowledge me. I’ll use “Github” as a generic pointer.
  • Others write programs and reposit in Github. I use them and build on them and I acknowledge them.
  • I offer constructive criticism.
  • I ask questions on Stackoverflow and I also answer them.
  • I’ve set up the Blue Obelisk where chemists can commit programs, make them interoperable.

This represents the pinnacle of what is possible in C21, with very modest/no funding and a collaborative intent. It works. It makes my heart soar. It’s wonderful. I’m proud to be a small part of it. Everyone wins.

There’s a similar ethos in Wiki/pedia/media/data. (“Wikipedia”).  Everyone can be a Wikipedian – all you need is to do it.

  • I have used Wikipedia for enhancing my knowledge and have contributed my knowledge to it.
  • I have used systems built by Wikipedians and I have contributed systems for use.
  • I have been to Wikipedia meetings, worked with the Wikipedians.
  • I promote Wikipedia.

I have been on the Advisory Board of Open Knowledge Foundation since it started. I have used OKF resources. I have contributed to them.

And so on… groups that I use and would contribute to if I had the time

  • Open Streetmap
  • Geograph
  • Open Corporates
  • MySociety
  • Mozilla

Most of these are cash-starved, and find innovative ways to generate enough income to make their primary products free and Open. (“Open” == “Free to use, free to re-use, free to re-distribute”, “Free as in speech”, “Free as in liberty”).

The C21 makes the sharing knowledge communities possible. It’s very very wonderful. If you don’t understand what I am saying then maybe you have to try it. Contribute to Wikipedia, add a photo to Geograph, “Write to Them” to your MEPs, FOI with “What do They Know”.

And you can start to be a C21 citizen at a very early age. The knowledge century is a wonderful place to live.

BUT…
Sadly …

Scholarly publishing in the 21st Century (C21) is completely broken

It’s a 20 Billion USD industry.

That’s

$20,000,000,000

of citizens’ money

It’s probably 1000 times more money than the average project mentioned above. Maybe even more.

So how is it broken? (If you know and love Github or Stackoverflow use them as a comparison of the wonderful against the broken). I am not going to apportion blame to publishers, libraries, authors, funders. They have all, wittingly or unwittingly contributed to one of the most dysfunctional knowledge systems on the planet.

And it matters. It’s not just money. It’s:

 

  • Human lives. I coined the phrase “Closed Access Means People Die”. I have been attacked for it. If it makes you feel more comfortable “Open Knowledge saves lives”.

 

  • The planet. To work out what is going to happen from anthropogenic (“human-made”) change of all sorts we need as much knowledge as possible. We are being deprived of it.
  • Citizens. It’s an unacceptably divisive system. Only 1% of the UK population (those in universities) are involved. Most of those are passive. They get told what to do. Citizens – doctors, teachers, politicians, businesses, taxi-drivers are excluded. Yes! Until taxi-drivers have a right to be involved in scholarship we are a divisive society.
  • Values. It’s distorting values. Ask a librarian/researcher/administrator why scientific publications should be free to everyone and you’ll probably get:

1. “The Funders require it”.

2. “You’ll get more citations if you publish Open Access”.

The moral and ethical imperative (“we have a responsibility to make knowledge free to everyone”) often isn’t mentioned.

  • Community.  For me “Open” is not primarily about money, it’s about working together, and being transparent.

… and in detail …

  • It’s criminally expensive. Publishers receive ca $5000 for each paper. It’s largely public or personal (e.g. student fees) money. It actually costs around $300 (administration: reviewers don’t get paid, authors don’t get paid). Maximum. Many people publish for $0 and give their time and marginal resources. That money could be used for research, could be used for teaching. The amounts spent on journal subscriptions in the UK (ca $1billion/year is similar to the cost of postgraduate education).
  • It’s criminally inefficient. Much of the work is carried out by humans when C21 systems could do the same for 5% of the cost. Stackoverflow manages 10 million questions.
  • It’s criminally slow. Some papers take years to appear. Postings to repositories take fractions of a second. The great Physics/Maths site arxiv can do this. But many publishers take years to publish a paper.
  • It’s elitist and probably corrupt. It stresses “top” journals. I am all for public competition and the best winning, but this isn’t that. It favours “top” institutions (I heard of one large research org that negotiates with a “top” publisher on how many papers they are allowed per year – before the work is done).
  • It destroys the real purpose of publication. I believe that science requires that you tell the world (not an elite) – fully (not in summary):
    • What you did
    • Who did it
    • Why you did it
    • How you did it (verification and re-use)
    • When you did it
    • Where you did it
    • what you discovered (or didn’t discover)

And invite the world to confirm/refute/help/criticize continually and continuously. Some competition is valuable. But competition has now become an end in itself and is destroying the other values.

I am involved in trying to bring these ideas into scholarly publishing. I have very largely been unsuccessful, when measured against the other Open activities where I have ben able to help create the C21 knowledge community.

  • I’ve developed semantics for chemistry (Chemical Markup Language, CML). Chemists, chemical publishers, universities ignore this.
  • I’ve developed open data bases (CrystalEye/COD). Publishers and universities ignore these.
  • I’ve prototyped semantic publication . Ignored.
  • I’ve pushed for a fully Open community of scientific scholarship. The Blue Obelisk. Ignored.
  • We’ve developed new tools for University Libraries. (Open Bibliography and BibJSON). Ignored.
  • I’ve campaigned for reform of Copyright. Ignored by academia and publishers
  • I’ve developed tools for using machines to help everyone read the scholarly literature. Active opposition.

Everyone blames everyone else. Some suffer, some get super-rich. Everyone is losing out.

It must change. Completely. If not from within, then from without.

Sci-hub is one of the external factors that could change scholarly publishing.

Completely.

Open Policy Network

The mission of the Open Policy Network is to foster the creation, adoption and implementation of open policies and practices that advance the public good by supporting open policy advocates, organizations and policy makers, connecting open policy opportunities with assistance, and sharing open policy information….”

Tummy bug 2: The scientific literature teaches us about Isospora

In the previous post we showed how ContentMine could give immediate knowledge about a scientific topic – we analysed “Isospora”, which is a nasty tummy bug. Let’s just read Wikipedia to get some idea of the language we’ll need

 

Life Cycle

PHIL 3398 lores

  • An oocyst with one sporoblast is released in stool of infected person
  • After the oocyst has been released, the sporoblast matures further and divides into two
  • After the sporoblasts divide they create a cyst wall and become sporocysts
  • The sporocysts each divide twice, resulting in four sporozoites
  • Transmission occurs when these mature oocysts are ingested
  • The sporocysts excyst in the small intestine where sporozoites are released
  • The sporozoites then invade epithelial cells and schizogony is initiated
  • When the schizonts rupture, mereozoites are released and continue to invade more epithelial cells
  • Trophozoites develop into schizonts, containing many mereozoites
  • After about one week, development of male and female gametocytes begin in the mereozoites
  • Fertilization results in the development of oocysts, which are released in the stool [1][6]

The sporulation time of this parasite’s egg is usually 1–4 days, and the entire life cycle takes about 9–10 days.[7]

 

Wow! That’s complicated! But that’s because Life is complicated! These parasites have complex life cycles. You have to learn the terms – but it’s no harder than learning the terms in a new game, or a law case, or soccer strategy. You just need to want to do it! And Wikipedia will help. Wikipedia is always there. These parasites are all Apicomplexans and here’s their language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apicomplexan_life_cycle#oocyst

 

So if you are interested in more than just Isospora, use ContentMine to search for “Apicomplexan”.

 

Most of the papers have well defined messages. The first was about opportunistic infections in HIV patients. Read the word cloudlet for each paper here and see if you can guess the subject of papers 2,3,4,5,6. If you know the species behind the latin names that helps. If you don’t use your friend Wikipedia.

 

Here’s my thinking:

  1. Already done
  2. “Caninum, Parasitology, Vets – probably about Dogs. Toxoplasma I’ve heard of – it’s a parasite and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasma_gondii confirms it. Never heard of Neospora or Hammondia but I wouldn’t eat them. Check – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neospora , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammondia_hammondi yes they are both Apicomplexa, the latter of cats. Did we get it right?

Canine faecal contamination and parasitic risk in the city of Naples (southern Italy).

  1. Seems to be about ferrets , and mink (Mustela) getting influenza.  Ferrets develop fatal influenza after inhaling small particle aerosols of highly pathogenic avian influenza virus A/Vietnam/1203/2004 (H5N1).

It is. But why are people worried about ferrets getting sick?? Because influenza uses non-human hosts such as birds and ferrets so we might get it from them. And when I was in the pharma industry they used ferrets as a model of human disease.
Where’s the Isospora?
The animals lacked signs of epizootic catarrhal enteritis, and were negative by microscopy for enteric protozoans such as Eimeria and Isospora species using fecasol, a sodium nitrate fecal flotation solution (EVSCO Pharmaceuticals, Buena, NJ).

 

Translation: we made sure the test animals didn’t have other infections that could distort our research (and we told you how we did it).

  1. I know Gallus is a hen. And we’re going to add an icon and a mouseover on the table so you don’t need to look it up. Eimeria is an apicomplexan, and because it occurs 6 times in the paper it’s pretty important. I’m guessing it’s about parasites of hens. But what’s the rest? There are lots of genes and my guess is that they being used for c omparative genetics or possibly modes of action.
    I don’t know what “QTL”. I probably should, but why bother when we have Wikipedia?

 

A quantitative trait locus (QTL) is a section of DNA (the locus) that correlates with variation in a phenotype (the quantitative trait).[1] The QTL typically is linked to, or contains, the genes that control that phenotype.

 

Rough Translation: The phenotype is what we feel, touch, smell, observe in an organism. and the QTL is that part of the genes that affects it.
So the paper is probably about genomic studies on parasites and chickens. Let’s look: QTL detection for coccidiosis (Eimeria tenella) resistance in a Fayoumi?×?Leghorn F? cross, using a medium-density SNP panel.

Rough translation: analysing the genome of chickens for regions that confer resistance the the most serious parasite. Eimeria is an apicompelxan, so I expect the paper mentions a range of them, including Isospora. (Yes: “Coccidia are sub-classified into several genera, including Eimeria, Isospora, Cryptosporidium, Toxoplasma and Sarcocystis. ) So we’re becoming experts on Apicomplexan names!

  1. Turdus, Coccothraustes … Thrushes and Hawfinch. Also cloudlet show “birds” and “iron”. “Deadly Outbreak of Iron Storage Disease (ISD) in Italian Birds of the Family Turdidae” . This is the paper where they examines the birdshit for parasites…

 

So that seems a lot of work – and we are only 5 papers through. But some of those are relevant to Natalie and some aren’t – her false positives. So can we get ContentMine to select just the ones she needs?
We hope so. If the paper has a lot about apicomplexans it’s probably relevant. If it’s about other diseases such as HIV or flu it’s probably not. So we could remove those automatically.

And that would save a lot of time. And hopefully help us learn bioscience in an efficient manner.

 

   

How ContentMine can help you! Our example looks for “tummy bug” for Natalie

Yesterday Tom, Natalie and I had coffee together. Natalie’s a Vet student – at Royal Veterinary College – and we got talking about her project – 8 weeks doing practical research on Isospora. I’ve never heard of it. No idea what it is.

But ContentMine will know, so we’ll ask it…

We’ll be showing you in later posts how it all works, but just accept that we type:

getpapers -q isospora -x

Wait a minute for ca 207 open access papers to be downloaded , and then

cmine isospora

And wait another minute for ami to crunch through the data. Ami has already created summary files and we’ll look at full.dataTables.html which gives an overall view of all the “plugins” we have used (species, genes, words, etc.). Here’s the first few papers:

Screen Shot 2016-04-29 at 14.04.19

No need to squint – We’ll describe them in larger detail. (Note: some of the links are broken and there are a few false positives, both are being cleaned up).

 

The first column results gives links to the papers (PMC2758902 is a PubMedCentral id and clicking it will link to the EuropePubMedCentral repository of full text papers). Yes, YOU can read them. 200 free papers. If your are interested in Isospora, they are all yours! So here’s the first paper of the 200..

PMC2758902 local

 

We still don’t know what Isospora is, so let’s click on Isospora belli . It’s linked to Wikipedia which says:

Cystoisospora belli, previously known as Isospora belli, is a parasite that causes an intestinal disease known as cystoisosporiasis.[1] This protozoan parasite is opportunistic in immune suppressed human hosts.[2] It primarily exists in the epithelial cells of the small intestine, and develops in the cell cytoplasm.[2] The distribution of this coccidian parasite is cosmopolitan, but is mainly found in tropical and subtropical areas of the world such as the Caribbean, Central and S. America, India, Africa, & S.E. Asia. In the U.S., it is usually associated with HIV infection and institutional living.[3]

So, to paraphrase,

“Isospora is the old name of a nasty tummy bug, found mainly, but not exclusively, in the sub/tropical world that can infect HIV-sufferers”

Biological science is often hard to read for newcomers, but with practice you learn how to translate. Here’s a sentence from one paper:

Coprological examination of fresh stool specimens revealed coccidian oocysts of the genus Isospora in 36% of the birds

Translated:

We examined birdshit and found parasite eggs in 36%.

The long words are useful – they aren’t there just to put you off or be pompous. They help translate between human languages, and they increase precision. If we search for “parasite eggs in birds” we might end up with bird eggs, whereas “oocytes” is more precise. ContentMine loves precise words because it reduces false positives (results that aren’t relevant to what you want).

Column “words” is a list of the commonest word tokens. In this case it’s just “patients”. That confirms that the paper is probably about human infection (though Natalie and other Vets call animals “patients”). So were we right? Click on PMC2758902 and we’ll see:

Screen Shot 2016-04-29 at 14.49.41

So it’s about HIV, and drug treatment. Where’s the Isospora? Search down the full text and we find:

The reasons for hospitalization were: disseminated tuberculosis (month 5), reactivation of oropharyngeal Kaposi’s sarcoma (month 3), and Isospora belli diarrhea with severe dehydration

So if you are interested in finding all papers where Isospora has infected HIV papers, ContentMine can immediately help you.

Nataliie’s main interest is veterinary, so we’ll look at the next few papers. But that shows how much there is in just ONE paper. And why we need machines to help us. Natalie probably mainly wants papers about animals and we can address that as well…

 

… in the next blog post!

 

TDM at European Parliament – tweet-like report

Great meeting at Brussels EP yesterday. Would have liked to tweet but didn’t have password. – There *were* tweets by the MEPs. So I wrote my notes like tweets I would have made.  Maye be useful to some, mystifying to others…

https://twitter.com/ComodiniCachia/status/725302288886169600/photo/1

ChDKk3ZW0AAON57

Also Julia Reda MEP was there at the start!

Here’s the panel (7-8) run by Catherine Stihler MEP (who chaired well and let everyone else speak)

Marco Giorello Head copyright Unit DG Connect

Problem: data analytics techniques involve making copies
These copies are relevant to copyright
Legal situation unclear;  some exceptions temporal copying, and copying for research purposes
(a) contractual conditions and policies
(b) legislation – UK exception – because there was already research exception (but leads to Euro fragmentation).
Other states have “research exception”. Other states e.g. France, and ?Germany we don’t want 15 different legislations
Dec 2015 – EC trying to find balance – PIRO [Public Interest Research Organization, yes I don’t what that is either, so asked later…] – to address Univs and research insts.
But aware that Univs have private partners
UK “non-commercial” has caused problems.
Not only about copyright – but also technology , standards …

John Boswell SAS (software company) – analysis of data.
TDM is just one form of data analysis. Copyright wider, bcos movies, images, voice all covered by copyright
analysis of 1 million docs to extract sentiment and time series, does not implicate (C).
(C) is protection of expression of an idea. Analysing this does not copy the expression or create a derivative work.(C) must not prevent TDM. Issue much bigger than Universities. World has so much (C) – ca 300, 000 every minute FB, Tweets, Instagram, etc. . Much covered by copyright
Analysis of social media is major good. Govs can use social media to predict economics
Debate must realise that TDM does  not implicate (C)

Theresa Comodini Cachia (MEP and meeting convener)

Don’t wish to have debate on copyright vs TDM
Startups need protection from copyright and also need to use TDM
Startup innovation are EU priority – social and economic development
TDM will lead to new economic development
Reda report focussed on academic reearch.
innovation not just economic but also health and social
would give good push to innovation

Jakub Czakon (Stermedia) – (data analyst Physics + finance + chess)
loves data
TDM = data -> information -> knowledge
example s/w that matches CVs onto job offers
extract important info from data
try to match qualifications- find connections and distances between documents
health care – diagnosis of tumour – used machine learning and public data – found public competition training set.
looks for cells and local structure. Created diagnostic indicators.
facial recognition
these skills and startups are critical for Europe

Adriana Homolova – data journalist and visualisation
dataScience >> data analysis (insight into data) >> data analytics (analysing large amounts of data) >> data mining
uses AI.
NeuralNets, RandomForests, NearestNeighbours
Data mining is starting in journalism
journalism qualitative vs quantitative – “Interview data”
makes journalism stronger
data analysis used to fliter professors for side jobs for “interesting people”
e.g. 3 side jobs per prof
BBC analysed tennis for match-fixing for repeated underperforming
published on github
revolutionary in journalism
Panama papers had 400 (competing) journalists to abandon secrecy “newsroom collaboration”
data are the raw material of our age.
copyright can do much harm.
data anslytics are extension of our thought proceses
we must look how to open up – e.g. copyleft

Jean-Francois Dechamp DG Research and Innovation
both policy creation and funding agency
FutureTDM and OpenMinTed
objective – best conditions to do their job
resarchers and both producers and consumers
researchers often don’t own copyright of their resaerch
competition fierce – merger of Springer and Nature
data journals
publishers => service providers

Sergey Filippov Lisbon Council (Brussels Innovation Think tank)
Report 2 years ago on TDM in Academic and Research Communities in Europe
Academic pubs 1.5 / year , 60 million in total
“Publish or perish” leads to distraction from teaching and poor research
Traditional k/w search, TDM can recognise concept s, facts realtions, preparatory
idea -> lit rev  (TDM)-> hypothesis (TDM) -> data methodology -> analys conclusions
what’s problem? copyright …
researched this…
scientific publications 1200 pubs 47% from US EU 26% EU cited less than US
applicable to all subjects, not just hard sciences
10-fold increase in Data mining, TDM papers in last 5 years
US 21%, EU 28, CN 10, IN 13%
Patents in data mining huge growth in China
Then he interviewed 20 researchers
most people don’t know about TDM or tech -savvy
many worried about copyright
leads to results of lower quality
academic want exceptions
R2RR2M
growth in CN and IN and US
Europeans concerned but worried about clarity
if we don’t manage to get TDM used, then far-reaching negative implications for EU

Questions:

Christoph Bruch: Open Science Coordination Office of the Helmholtz association,

lot of researchers want assurance
Must not be universities only
(to  Marco EC) must not limit how society can use information
limit will do very much damage

Marco – commercial vs nc. Current draft is not final.
Why not business activities. Exception would also be (C) but certan classes of beneficiaries.
must look at (C) with care
cause friction
Pharma already use licences
Existing lucrative Market for re-use so EC can’t easily sweep it away
attempt to give full legal certainty
will be positive for academia and neutral for others

Boswell SAS – there is broad exception for TDM as “fair use” if not used for other purpose
interim step – new work is not copy of expression
in EC temporary copy should be covered by 5.1 of InfoSoc directive
PPIs with universities – lines are blurred
Should not make lines between univs and others

PM-R gave TDMer point of view and asked about PIRO – more later

 

Who’s downloading pirated papers? Everyone | Science

“But in increasing numbers, researchers around the world are turning to Sci-Hub, which hosts 50 million papers and counting. Over the 6 months leading up to March, Sci-Hub served up 28 million documents. More than 2.6 million download requests came from Iran, 3.4 million from India, and 4.4 million from China. The papers cover every scientific topic, from obscure physics experiments published decades ago to the latest breakthroughs in biotechnology. The publisher with the most requested Sci-Hub articles? It is Elsevier by a long shot—Sci-Hub provided half-a-million downloads of Elsevier papers in one recent week.

These statistics are based on extensive server log data supplied by Alexandra Elbakyan, the neuroscientist who created Sci-Hub in 2011 as a 22-year-old graduate student in Kazakhstan (see bio, p. 511). I asked her for the data because, in spite of the flurry of polarized opinion pieces, blog posts, and tweets about Sci-Hub and what effect it has on research and academic publishing, some of the most basic questions remain unanswered: Who are Sci-Hub’s users, where are they, and what are they reading? …”

E.U. Presents New Arctic Policy

“Twenty-two of Europe’s leading Arctic research institutions will develop an integrated European polar research program under the E.U.-PolarNet initiative. The E.U. is to support the transnational access to research infrastructures in the Arctic (research stations, scientific vessels, satellite observations) and the open access to data resources….”

The University of Udine approves the Open Access Policy – Qui.Uniud

From Google’s English: “The University of Udine approves the Open Access Policy. Institutional Archive with search results, available at https://air.uniud.it/ , meets the best practices and international technical standards on open access….The Udine University has joined this movement more than three years ago. In October 2013 he was appointed an Officer of the University for open access (Prof. Carla Piazza) and set up a working group. In February 2015, the SA approved the Policy on Open Access (OA) to scientific literature that establishes the University’s position with respect to the open access movement, and sets out general criteria for the Library Management Institutional archive then officially established in April 2015. It is being built for a service of the University in support of teachers and researchers (both for deposit procedures in the archive is to negotiate with publishers the republishing rights)….”

 

GODAN | Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition

“GODAN supports the proactive sharing of open data to make information about agriculture and nutrition available, accessible and usable to deal with the urgent challenge of ensuring world food security.  It is a rapidly growing group, currently with over 240 partners from national governments, non-governmental, international and private sector organisations that have committed to a joint Statement of Purpose.

The initiative focuses on building high-level support  among governments, policymakers, international organizations and business.  GODAN promotes collaboration to harness the growing volume of data generated by new technologies to solve long-standing problems and to benefit farmers and the health of consumers. We encourage collaboration and cooperation between stakeholders in the sector….”