Data miners strike gold on copyright

In a significant victory for data miners, the open access publisher BioMed Central is to waive all copyright over datasets it publishes.

From early September, the biomedical publisher, which is owned by Springer, will publish all datasets under a Creative Commons CC0 licence, which waives all rights to the material.

Data miners, who use software to analyse data drawn from numerous papers, have called for CC0, also known as “no rights reserved”, to be the standard licence for datasets...

...In a statement, the publisher says that “the true research potential of knowledge that is captured in data will only be released if data mining and other forms of data analysis and re-use are not in any form restricted by licensing requirements.