MRC welcomes reforms for UK intellectual property laws
4 July 2011
The government has announced plans to modernise intellectual property laws. The plans for reform include ten recommendations outlined in an independent review on intellectual property carried out by Professor Ian Hargreaves, chair of Digital Economy at Cardiff University.
Included in the review’s recommendations is the introduction of an exception to copyright for search and analysis techniques known as ‘text and data mining’ which would allow research scientists greater access to data.
This follows the recent announcement that the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) will lead the management and development of UK PubMed Central (UKPMC), the free online literature resource for life science researchers which is part-funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC).
UKPMC provides access to a library of more than two million full-text biomedical research articles, more than 25 million citations from PubMed and Agricola, patents from the European Patent Office, UK treatment guidelines and biomedical PhD theses. Biomedical literature can be found using integrated full text and abstract searches.
Geraldine Clement-Stoneham, knowledge and information manager at the Medical Research Council, said:
“The MRC has made a substantial investment towards the development of text-mining technology through UKPMC in order to help researchers easily access the corpus of academic literature. When these reforms come into force, researchers will be able to search the text of over two million academic articles. UKPMC is increasingly becoming a very valuable research resource for accessing publications and related information free of charge.”
Notes to editors:
The full recommendations of the Hargreaves review can be accessed here.
The UKPMC Funders’ Group comprises the following funding organisations: Action on Hearing Loss; Arthritis Research UK; Austrian Science Fund (FWF); Biotechnology and Biosciences Research Council; Breakthrough Breast Cancer; British Heart Foundation; Cancer Research UK; The Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health Directorates; The Dunhill Medical Trust; Marie Curie Cancer Care; Medical Research Council; the Motor Neurone Disease Association; the Multiple Sclerosis Society; Myrovlytis Trust; National Institute for Health Research (Department of Health); Parkinson's UK; Telethon (Italy) and the Wellcome Trust. It is currently chaired by Dr Tony Peatfield (MRC).
More information about UKPMC can be found here.
