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