- NEWS FEATURE
- Correction 19 July 2019
A giant data store quietly being built in India could free vast swathes of science for computer analysis — but is it legal?
By
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Priyanka Pulla
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Priyanka Pulla is a freelance journalist based in Bengaluru, India.
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Carl Malamud in front of the data store of 73 million articles that he plans to let scientists text mine. Credit: Smita Sharma for Nature
Carl Malamud is on a crusade to liberate information locked up behind paywalls — and his campaigns have scored many victories. He has spent decades publishing copyrighted legal documents, from building codes to court records, and then arguing that such texts represent public-domain law that ought to be available to any citizen online. Sometimes, he has won those arguments in court. Now, the 60-year-old American technologist is turning his sights on a new objective: freeing paywalled scientific literature. And he thinks he has a legal way to do it.
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Nature 571, 316-318 (2019)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02142-1
Updates & Corrections
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Correction 19 July 2019: An earlier version of this feature used the term ‘fair use’ inappropriately — the term isn’t relevant under Indian law.
Text-mining offers clues to success
