In a meeting run by OSC at Cambridge 2017-07-12 I present the current capabilities of contentmine.org. This includes advocacy, tools and community.

1. OSC, University of Cambridge,
Cambridge, UK, 2017-07-12
ContentMine: Mining Scientific
Literature
Peter Murray-Rust
TheContentMine http://contentmine.org
Changing the law is not enough.
The government, universities and libraries
have to actively support researchers.

2. (2x digital music industry!)
ContentMine is an OpenLocked Non-Profit company

3. (2x digital music industry!)
ContentMine is an OpenLocked Non-Profit company
Mining 100 million facts
from the scientific literature

4. Topics
• Advocacy/Politics. Be engaged or be part of
the problem. Assert our rights.
• Tools and resources. Demos! We have created
a Open toolkit and we welcome help.
• Community, especially young people.
OpenConCam “Bullied into bad science”.
Challenge the Publisher-Academic Complex
Slides at http://slideshare.net/petermurrayrust/

5. National UK support for TDM since Hargreaves
2014?
TDM is effectively controlled by publishers who
bully researchers by cutting off subscriptions.

6. Example: Content Mining can save lives
• Search for papers with “Ebola” and “Liberia”

9. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/08/opinion/yes-we-were-warned-about-
ebola.html
We were stunned recently when we stumbled across an article by European
researchers in Annals of Virology [1982]: “The results seem to indicate that
Liberia has to be included in the Ebola virus endemic zone.” In the future,
the authors asserted, “medical personnel in Liberian health centers should be
aware of the possibility that they may come across active cases and thus be
prepared to avoid nosocomial epidemics,” referring to hospital-acquired
infection.
Adage in public health: “The road to inaction is paved with research
papers.”
Bernice Dahn (chief medical officer of Liberia’s Ministry of Health)
Vera Mussah (director of county health services)
Cameron Nutt (Ebola response adviser to Partners in Health)
A System Failure of Scholarly Publishing

10. What is “Content”?
http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchObject.action?uri=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.01113
03&representation=PDF CC-BY
SECTIONS
MAPS
TABLES
CHEMISTRY
TEXT
MATH
contentmine.org tackles these

12. Examples
• Bag of words
• Chemistry
• Zika
• Phylogenetics

13. Bag of Words
Theses from HAL repository
Full text is essential

14. “… simulated by 21cmFAST is in principle independent”
“it is a feature of the 21cmFAST code, and
is explained in §3.1.”
SciCodes[1]: Searching for software in arXiv[1]
[1] Proposal to LJ Arnold Foundation (Alice Allen ASCL and PMR)
Using the semi-numerical simulation, 21cmFAST,
[2] arxiv.org: the physics/maths/astronomy.. Preprint server
The language identifies the software!
arxIv has >500 mentions of “21cmFast”

15. http://chemicaltagger.ch.cam.ac.uk/
• Typical
Typical chemical synthesis

16. Automatic semantic markup of chemistry
Could be used for analytical, crystallization, etc.

17. Infrastrucure
• ContentMine has built much of this
• Interoperates with SciPy, R-OpenSci, GitHub …
• Fully Open (CC BY, Apache 2)
http://github.com/ContentMine (20+
repositories)

18. • CRAWL the web for scientific documents
(articles, grey literature, repositories)
• quickSCRAPE pages (text, graphics, images, data)
• NORMA-lize page to semantic form
…Open semantic science …
• MINE pages with your methods and tools (AMI)
• CAT-alogue results in searchable index
• Link to WIKIDATA
• Automate daily process (CANARY)
contentmine.org Infrastructure

19. catalogue
getpapers
query
Daily
Crawl
EuPMC, arXiv
CORE , HAL,
(UNIV repos)
ToC
services
PDF HTML
DOC ePUB
TeX XML
PNG
EPS CSV
XLSURLs
DOIs
crawl
quickscrape
norma
Normalizer
Structurer
Semantic
Tagger
Text
Data
Figures
ami
UNIV
Repos
search
Lookup
CONTENT
MINING
Chem
Phylo
Trials
Crystal
Plants
COMMUNITY
plugins
Visualization
and Analysis
PloSONE, BMC,
peerJ… Nature, IEEE,
Elsevier…
Publisher Sites
scrapers
queries
taggers
abstract
methods
references
Captioned
Figures
Fig. 1
HTML tables
30, 000 pages/day
Semantic ScholarlyHTML
Facts
CONTENTMINE Complete OPEN Platform for Mining Scientific Literature

20. Evolutionary (phylogenetic) trees
• International Journal Systematic and
Evolutionary Microbiology
• Diagrams from 4300 independent articles
A machine-compiled microbial supertree from figure-mining thousands of papers
Ross Mounce, Peter Murray-Rust, Matthew A Wills
Research Ideas and Outcomes 3: e13589 (09 May 2017)
https://doi.org/10.3897/rio.3.e13589

21. “Root”

22. OCR (Tesseract)
Norma (imageanalysis)
(((((Pyramidobacter_piscolens:195,Jonquetella_anthropi:135):86,Synergistes_jonesii:301):131,Thermotoga
_maritime:357):12,(Mycobacterium_tuberculosis:223,Bifidobacterium_longum:333):158):10,((Optiutus_te
rrae:441,(((Borrelia_burgdorferi:…202):91):22):32,(Proprinogenum_modestus:124,Fusobacterium_nucleat
um:167):217):11):9);
Semantic re-usable/computable output (ca 4 secs/image)

23. Supertree created from 4300 papers

24. Search for 200 articles with “Zika”
file:///Users/pm286/workspace/projects/zika/full.dataTables.html
8 facets linked to Wikidata

25. ContentMine believes in young people

26. ContentMine Workshops on Mining
Chris Kittel, CM, atMozfest 2015
Stefan Kasberger, CM

27. 6 ContentMine Fellows for 6 months

28. Neo Christopher Chung
 Warsaw, Computational Biology
 Wants to find out geographic and temporal differences in the use of genomic software tools

29. Paola Masuzzo
 Ghent, Computational Omics and Systems Biology
 Wants to mine literature around cell migrations and invasion to create 1) collection of
minimum requirements, 2) check for nomenclatura consistency and 3) construct a knowledge map

30. Alexandra Bannach-Brown
 Edinburgh, Neuroscience
 Problem: huge body of works in animal studies about depressions. systematic review is the main
approach for getting insight.
 Wants: identify papers in systematic review of depressive behaviour in animals. What
drugs, what methods, what outcomes and signs/phenotypes. Use outcomes for document
clustering.
 and expedite scientific advances."
 Corpus: 70.000 Papers

31. Alexandre Hannud Abdo
 “Our goal is to mine facts from global health research and provide automated referenced
summaries to practitioners and agents who don’t have the means or the time to navigate the
literature.
 From Brazil, Life Sciences, works on project about evolution of oncology
 extract facts from cancer research conference papers and global health
papers
OPEN NOTEBOOK RESEARCH

32. Guanyang Zhang
 Biology, Arizona
 „My ContentMine Fellowship project will focus on mining weevil-plant associations
from literature records.“
 „Motivation. Comprising ~70,000 described and 220,000 estimated species, weevils
(Curculionoidea) are one of the most diverse plant-feeding insect lineages and constitute nearly
5% of all known animals.“
 „Knowledge of host plant associations is critical for pest management, conservation, and
comparative biological research. This knowledge is, however, scattered in 300 years of historical
literature and difficult to access.“
 Weevil-plant association network graph made with Google Fusion Table. Each blue circle is a weevil
tribe and yellow circle a plant genus. The size of a circle represents the number of associations.

33. Lars Willighagen
 15 years old NL
 Wants: extract data about conifers (relations to chemicals, height etc.)
 Outcome: database with webpage containing conifer properties
 Table Facts Visualiser DEMO
 Card DEMO
 Word Cloud
 „ I applied to this fellowship to learn new things and combine the ContentMine with two previous
projects I never got to finish, and I got really excited by the idea and the ContentMine at large.“

34. • Chris Hartgerink
Tilburg University (NL)
• Reproducible Science
• Extracting statistical information
• Helping authors check
reported results
• Detecting problematic study
results (e.g., clinical trials)

35. [1]
[1] STATCHECK from Chris Hartgerink

36. “Symmetry [is] indication of
potential publication bias”
Machines are BETTER than humans here
Can we believe meta-analyses of clinical trials?

37. file:///Users/pm286/workspace/svg2xml/targe
t/table/ada2PH1Total.html
ContentMine converts PDF to HTML
Perfect for machines!
PDF table 
HTML5 table Horrible for machines!
Project with Prof James Thomas, Alison O’Mara-Eves at UCL

38. And now the main problem…

39. @Senficon (Julia Reda) :Text & Data mining in times of
#copyright maximalism:
"Elsevier stopped me doing my research"
http://onsnetwork.org/chartgerink/2015/11/16/elsevi
er-stopped-me-doing-my-research/ … #opencon #TDM
Elsevier stopped me doing my research
Chris Hartgerink

40. I am a statistician interested in detecting potentially problematic research such as data fabrication,
which results in unreliable findings and can harm policy-making, confound funding decisions, and
hampers research progress.
To this end, I am content mining results reported in the psychology literature. Content mining the
literature is a valuable avenue of investigating research questions with innovative methods. For
example, our research group has written an automated program to mine research papers for errors in
the reported results and found that 1/8 papers (of 30,000) contains at least one result that could
directly influence the substantive conclusion [1].
In new research, I am trying to extract test results, figures, tables, and other information reported in
papers throughout the majority of the psychology literature. As such, I need the research papers
published in psychology that I can mine for these data. To this end, I started ‘bulk’ downloading research
papers from, for instance, Sciencedirect. I was doing this for scholarly purposes and took into account
potential server load by limiting the amount of papers I downloaded per minute to 9. I had no intention
to redistribute the downloaded materials, had legal access to them because my university pays a
subscription, and I only wanted to extract facts from these papers.
Full disclosure, I downloaded approximately 30GB of data from Sciencedirect in approximately 10 days.
This boils down to a server load of 0.0021GB/[min], 0.125GB/h, 3GB/day.
Approximately two weeks after I started downloading psychology research papers, Elsevier notified my
university that this was a violation of the access contract, that this could be considered stealing of
content, and that they wanted it to stop. My librarian explicitly instructed me to stop downloading
(which I did immediately), otherwise Elsevier would cut all access to Sciencedirect for my university.
I am now not able to mine a substantial part of the literature, and because of this Elsevier is directly
hampering me in my research.
[1] Nuijten, M. B., Hartgerink, C. H. J., van Assen, M. A. L. M., Epskamp, S., & Wicherts, J. M. (2015). The
prevalence of statistical reporting errors in psychology (1985–2013). Behavior Research Methods, 1–22.
doi: 10.3758/s13428-015-0664-2
Chris Hartgerink’s blog post

41. http://onsnetwork.org/chartgerink/2016/02/23/wiley-also-stopped-my-doing-my-research/
Wiley also stopped me (Chris Hartgerink) doing my research
In November, I wrote about how Elsevier wanted me to stop downloading scientific articles for my research. Today, Wiley
also ordered me to stop downloading.
As a quick recapitulation: I am a statistician doing research into detecting
potentially problematic research such as data fabrication and
estimating how often it occurs. For this, I need to download many scientific articles, because my research
applies content mining methods that extract facts from them (e.g., test statistics). These facts serve as my data to answer my research
questions. If I cannot download these research articles, I cannot collect the data I need to do my research.
I was downloading psychology research articles from the Wiley library, with a maximum of 5 per minute. I did this using the tool quickscrape,
developed by the ContentMine organization. With this, I have downloaded approximately 18,680 research articles from the Wiley library,
which I was downloading solely for research purposes.
Wiley noticed my downloading and notified my university library that they detected a compromised proxy, which they
had immediately restricted. They called it “illegally downloading copyrighted content
licensed by your institution”. However, at no point was there any investigation into whether my user credentials were
actually compromised (they were not). Whether I had legitimate reasons to download these articles was never discussed.
The original email from Wiley is available here.
As a result of Wiley denying me to download these research articles, I cannot collect data from
another one of the big publishers, alongside Elsevier. Wiley is more strict than Elsevier by immediately condemning the
downloading as illegal, whereas Elsevier offers an (inadequate) API with additional terms of use (while legitimate access
has already been obtained). I am really confused about what the publisher’s stance on content mining is, because Sage
and Springer seemingly allow it; I have downloaded 150,210 research articles from Springer
and 12,971 from Sage and they never complained about it.

42. What you must do
• ACTIVELY encourage Mining and researchers
• INVEST in tools, resources, training
• ENCOURAGE cooperative publishers
• PROTECT researchers from aggressive publishers
• Need ACTIONS, not WORDS or it will be too late

43. OUP1 Data Mining Policy
http://www.oxfordjournals.org/en/help/third-party-data-mining.html
… we are happy to accommodate TDM for non-
commercial use. Although researchers are not required
to request permission for non-commercial text-mining,
OUP is happy to offer consultation … including avoidance
of any technical safeguards triggers OUP has in place
1 Oxford University Press

44. H2020 project,
Coordinated by LIBER
Evidence collection

45. Julia Reda, Pirate MEP, running ContentMine
software to liberate science 2016-04-16

46. • Speak out. Write to your MEP, MP, Vice-chancellor.
• Assert RESEARCHER RIGHTS.
• Stand up to Publisher-Academic bullies.
• Create communities of practice. Young people.
• Write Open software
Action is required