Text Data Mining from the Author's Perspective: Whose Text, Whose Mining, and to Whose Benefit?

Researchers have sought technical access to proprietary databases of published materials since the earliest days of online databases in the latter 1970s, yet publishers continue to write university contracts based only on human readership. By the time of Google Books and the associated author lawsuits, ca 2005, we learned that publishers wished to restrict “nonconsumptive use” of scholarly content (Duguid, 2007; Leetaru, 2008; Nunberg, 2011). Throughout this period, the move toward open access to journal articles accelerated, with arXiv launching in 1991 (Ginsparg, 2011) and PubMed Central in 2000 (“PMC Overview,” 2018). Numerous other discipline-specific preprint servers, institutional repositories, and commercial services designed to distribute or redistribute open access versions of scholarly publications have been launched since. Concurrently, open access to publications became mandatory or highly recommended by many funding agencies and universities, in the U.S. and abroad.