NaCTeM

NaCTeM welcomes Government response to Hargreaves Review

2011-08-09

The National Centre for Text Mining notes with great pleasure that the Government has accepted all ten of the recommendations of the Hargreaves Review of Intellectual Property and Growth. It is particularly pleased to see that the Government plans to "bring forward proposals for a substantial opening up of the UK's copyright exceptions regime, including a wide non-commercial research exception covering text and data mining".

Commenting on the Government's response, Prof Sophia Ananiadou, Director of NaCTeM, said:

"Although there is a long way to go in terms of the legislative process, it is crucial that the Government has recognised the societal and economic benefits of text mining and of its role in enabling scientists to discover new knowledge, thus helping to drive innovation.

"Text mining finds new, unsuspected knowledge that is not explicitly written down. It does so by processing very large amounts of scientific text, far in excess of what the individual scientist can hope to analyse and assimilate on his own. Copyright issues, however, have significantly hampered the application and impact of text mining, to the great frustration of the scientific and medical community, limiting innovation and growth, and effectively putting a highly undesirable brake on the search for new medicines and treatments.

"It is also very welcome that the Government proposes to engage at an EU level to push for a review of EU legislation regarding the removal of barriers to application of technologies such as text mining in support of medical and scientific research.

"NaCTeM, as a JISC-sponsored National Centre, stands ready to offer advice and evidence, and to participate in the consultative process that will now begin."

More information...
http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ipresponse



Previous itemNext item
Back to news summary page