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

Under the terms of the statement of principles, open access (OA) 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 does not 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 OA publishing. “Huge added value can be incorporated into 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 that the principles “demonstrate that funders and publishers can work together constructively”.
The statement of principles 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 OA publishing policies.