Open access group Wellcomes re-use of literature

British PubMed Central works out principals of copying and using research

New principals for re-using open access published scientific material have been laid out by the UK PubMed Central Publishers Panel. The Statement of Principals will allow scientists and researchers to use published material themselves in databases and linking, which could lead to further scientific discovery.

Under the terms of the statement of principals open access published articles can be copied, and the text data mined for further research, as long as the original author is fully attributed. Re-use of the material must be for non-commercial purposes and cannot alter the moral rights of the original authors.

"Reading the results of the research is only the first step," said Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, the UK's largest medical research funding body and a strong advocate of open access publishing. "Huge added value can be added to research by linking the text of scientific papers to databases, such as protein sequences and genome databases. Sophisticated text mining techniques can link related papers one to another, which may lead to the development of new scientific ideas."

Bob Campbell senior publisher at Wiley-Blackwell said the principals "demonstrates that funders and publishers can work together constructively".

Open access journal articles charge for the publishing process. The article is then freely available on the internet from open access online journals or at databases like UK PubMed Central. UK PubMed Central is an off-shoot of the US National Institutes of Health PubMed Central online repository.

The statement of principals also validates the role of publishers and the value they add to research, in a clear attack on the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM), a lobby group from the Association of American Publishers that is lobbying against pro-open access publishing policies.