From: Isabelle de Kaenel <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 16 May 2012 11:51:36 -0500

Hello, Concerning this topic (copyright laws, text mining and
publishers), we are going to present a poster at the 2012 EAHIL
(European Association for Health Information and Libraries )
conference in Brussels. Mid 2011, the research team at the Department
of Ambulatory Care and Community Medicine, University of Lausanne
(Switzerland), decided to start a project on a new research topic :
Shared Decision Making (SDM). The objective was to identify
publication trends about SDM in 15 major internal medicine journals
over the last 15 years.

It was decided to use a "text mining" approach to systematically
review all the articles published in these major journals and
automatically search for the different occurrences of SDM (and
variants) within the full text of the articles. The research team
turned to the medical library for help to collect the electronic
publication files and to negociate permissions. To make a long story
short, after many mails and letters, in may 2012, only 5 out of 15
publishers have agreed to grant the right to systematically download
the articles for research purpose. Permission was usually granted
under one main condition : all content downloaded for analysis should
be destroyed when research is complete.

See the abstract :
http://sites-final.uclouvain.be/EAHIL2012/conference/?q=node/834
Isabelle de Kaenel University Medical Library Lausanne Switzerland