• H2020
• Policy & Research

Science Europe has welcomed new European Commission proposals on research data mining.

The organisation has been advocating for a future ‘research-friendly copyright law’, particularly regarding a mandatory stipulation ensuring that text and data mining (TDM) for research purposes does not infringe copyright. On Wednesday, Brussels published its position on TDM in its new Communication ‘Towards a modern, more European copyright framework’.

Science Europe says that by the Commission stating that it will consider legislative proposals “in order to allow public interest research organisations to carry out text and data mining of content they have lawful access to, with full legal certainty, for scientific research purposes”, Brussels is taking an important step towards contributing to improvements of the scientific environment.

Commenting, Christoph Bruch, advisor at the Helmholtz Association Open Science Co-ordination Office, Germany, and lead author of a Science Europe paper on copyright reform, said: “progress has been made with this communication; safeguarding an exception for research is a significant step in paving the way to efficiently exploit the potential of the mining technologies.

“It is now crucial that the upcoming legislative process builds on what has been announced in this Communication, by making the TDM exception mandatory and by defining the concept of ‘public interest research organisations’”.

Science Europe is an association of major European research funding and research performing organisations in 27 countries.