Springer has partnered with Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) on a new solution enabling corporate life sciences researchers to perform text and data mining (TDM) quickly and easily across publishers. As one of the first publishers to sign onto the service, Springer will offer a significant portion of its full-text article content through the CCC service when launched later this year.
TDM is growing exponentially in value as big data has become an important building block of advanced life sciences research. However, the enormous breadth and volume of research, published in thousands of different scientific, technical and medical (STM) journals, creates enormous complexity for those who wish to mine that content. Since each publisher makes its content available through their own unique online services, researchers face a major stumbling block in accessing massive amounts of content from multiple publishers. Without CCC’s solution, scientists have had no single source from which to select and download all of the articles they want to mine in a compliant way.
“We know from our constant, ongoing conversations with customers that text and data mining is critical to their research, but also that the task of going to each publisher individually is time-consuming and complicated,” said Bettina Goerner, Managing Director for Springer’s Corporate Markets and Databases. “We have a vested interest in making research as easy as possible for our customers, and a deep tradition of innovation at Springer, so taking part in CCC’s new venture was an easy decision.”
The new service is focused on making research easier for the end user. Springer will supply CCC with full-text versions of its journal content. CCC will then take Springer’s content, along with that of other participating publishers, normalize the Extensible Markup Language (XML) for consistency across publishers, and make it available to users of the new service. The XML available to users will be based on customer access rights and subscription data provided to CCC by the publishers. Customers can then download the data and upload it to their own in-house systems to use in their research.
“Customers have been looking for a single and compliant source for XML content across multiple publishers,” said Lauren Tulloch, Director, Corporate Products and Services, CCC. “As a trusted partner of the scientific, medical and technical publishing community, CCC is well-positioned to fill this role. We are pleased that Springer is eager to partner with us, and we look forward to launching our service with Springer and other participating publishers this year.”
This partnership with CCC targets the corporate market. For non-commercial research, Springer grants text- and data-mining rights to subscribed content to researchers via their institutions.