ERMeCC researcher Dr. Christian Handke has won two awards for his co-written article "Is Europe Falling Behind in Data Mining? Copyright"s Impact on Data Mining in Academic Research".
The article was awarded with the Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER) Innovation Award 2015. Furthermore, in 2015 the article was a European Policy for Intellectual Property (EPIP) Best Paper Finalist. The article was ultimately selected as the conference's second best paper.
The article was written by Dr. Christian Handke from Erasmus University Rotterdam (Arts and Culture Studies and ERMeCC), Dr. Lucie Guibault from the University of Amsterdam) and Dr. Joan-Josep Vallbé from the University of Barcelona. It was published on the Social Science Research Network in June of 2015.
Copyright versus data mining
The empirical paper discusses how copyright affects data mining by academic researchers. Based on bibliometric data, the authors show that where data mining for academic research requires the express consent of rights holders, data mining makes up a significantly lower share of total research output. Furthermore, a stronger rule-of-law is associated with less data mining research. The article was deemed important by the judges because of its discussion of the negative association between copyright protection and innovation.