JISC report on “Value and benefits of text mining”

By | May 15, 2014

I came across this excellent report titled “Value and benefits of text mining”. The report was commissioned by JISC, “a registered charity and champion the use of digital technologies in UK education and research.

The report has “explored the costs, benefits, barriers and risks associated with text mining within UKFHE (UK further and higher education) research”.

The report rightly points out how text mining has already been explored by business “to analyse customer and competitor data to improve competitiveness”, two example mentioned are, “the pharmaceutical industry mines patents and research articles to improve drug discovery; within academic research, mining and analytics of large datasets are delivering efficiencies and new knowledge in areas as diverse as biological science, particle physics and media and communications.”

Speaking particularly about the global research community it goes to mention, it “generates over 1.5 million new scholarly articles per annum.” That’s really huge! If this scholarly articles are mined their exists huge “opportunity to support innovation”.

The report recognizes copyright laws, particularly in UK, as one of the issues that might hinder use of text mining in UK research circles. It quotes how recommendations of Hargreaves report which “proposes an exception to support text mining and analytics for non-commercial research.” can remedy this situation.

Here are some key findings of this report,

1) Text mining has tremendous scope in the area of biomedical sciences, chemistry, social sciences and humanities. Given the current copyright laws, text mining can be carried out on only Open documents, which are limited in number.

2) One has to incur huge transaction cost to gain access to text minable documents. This is attributed to “the need to negotiate a maze of licensing agreements covering the collections researchers wish to study.”

3) It arrives at both specific and broader societal benefits such as, “increased researcher efficiency; unlocking hidden information and developing new knowledge; exploring new horizons; improved research and evidence base; and improving the research process and quality. Broader economic and societal benefits include cost savings and productivity gains, innovative new service development, new business models and new medical treatments.’

I found this report an interesting read, request you to continue reading at  http://www.jisc.ac.uk/reports/value-and-benefits-of-text-mining

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