Guadamuz and Cabell (2014)
Contents
Source Details
Guadamuz and Cabell (2014) | |
Title: | Data Mining in UK Higher Education Institutions: Law and Policy |
Author(s): | Guadamuz, A., Cabell, D. |
Year: | 2014 |
Citation: | Guadamuz, A. and Cabell, D. (2014) Data Mining in UK Higher Education Institutions: Law and Policy. Queen Mary Intellectual Property Review 4:1 pp. 3-29 |
Link(s): | Open Access |
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About the Data | |
Data Description: | The research primarily examines the UK legal framework for text and data mining exceptions, and considers more specifically the policies of higher education institutions in regards to this type of reuse. The research compares the results of findings regarding open licensing practices from various repositories and databases, as well as conducting a survey of repositories detailed in the SHERPA list, and data.gov.uk case study. |
Data Type: | Primary and Secondary data |
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Cross Country Study?: | No |
Comparative Study?: | No |
Literature review?: | No |
Government or policy study?: | No |
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Abstract
“This article explores some of the issues surrounding data mining in the UK's higher education institutions (HEIs). Data mining is understood as the computational analysis of data contained in a text or data set in order to extract new knowledge from it. There are two main ways in which HEIs are involved with data mining: in the process of conducting research, and as producers of data. As consumers, HEIs may have restrictions on the manner in which they can conduct research given the fact that it is likely that content will be protected by intellectual property rights. As producers, HEIs are faced with increasing pressure to make publicly-funded research available to the public through institutional repositories and other similar open access schemes, but some of these do not set out reuse policies for data. The article concludes that if more research was made available with adequate licensing strategies, then the question of whether data mining research is legal would be moot.”
Main Results of the Study
An analysis of the data.gov.uk repository reveals that 84.4% of publicly-funded works are available via an Open Government Licence. Conversely, half of the works available through the OKF Data Hub have no specific licence attached. The authors ascribe the success of the data.gov.uk to clear licensing instructions from the institution (where this is absent from the OKF Data Hub).Of the 53 publicly accessible repositories listed on the SHERPA repository site, only 37% had “clear, easy-to-access and unambiguous data reuse policies”. Most terms of use centre around giving uploaders a general understanding of copyright, and warning regarding plagiarism, as opposed to clarifying policies on reuse. Similarly, the OpenDOAR repository list confirms that 61% of UK repositories have no clear policy on metadata, and 57.7% have no clear policies on reuse. Authors ascribe this to the lack of harmonised industry-standards, with repositories using both ad hoc policies, and Creative Commons licences.
Policy Implications as Stated By Author
The research recommends that repositories and higher education institutions should implement a “top-down” approach to licensing, which avoids the risk of licence proliferation. In their case study example, this involves the inclusion of a clause which states that the content of a repository is made available under a singular licence, which future uploaders must subscribe to. By introducing an institutional-level harmonised standard of reuse policies in relation to data mining, this may bypass any legal questions of compliance with legislation (such as whether data mining is fair dealing, or whether the copying process is transient).
Coverage of Study
Datasets
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