Derived Text Formats as Strategic Transformations of In-Copyright Materials to Support Open Science: A Survey

Abstract

Derived Text Formats (DTFs) are the result of a strategic transformation of textual materials that are protected by copyright in their original form, such that the resulting data is useful for computational analyses and can be openly shared following best practices of Open Science without infringing copyright law. This paper aims to provide insights into several key aspects of this concept that is closely related to concepts such as corpus masking, non-consumptive research and extracted features. The paper establishes the motivation for using DTFs, discusses several foundational aspects of the concept and practice, describes ongoing research on issues including copyright, reconstructibility, evaluation and standardization of DTFs, and concludes with a roadmap for future work on DTFs. In this way, this paper provides a broad but concise overview of work on DTFs as a contribution to Open Science practices, with a focus on work in the Digital Humanities.

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