Less could be more at Nexis
Jinfo Blog

24th August 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

Over 2,000 global newspapers feature on Nexis – but earlier this year came word that News International’s offerings would soon not be among them. Now it seems that selected News International content may continue to feature on Nexis, not as full text but as abstracts. It was last March that details emerged of News International’s intention to withdraw all its archived news content from Nexis – putting the service at a disadvantage to its News International-owned competitor Factiva, which would continue to provide such access (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e28433). Now, however, following industry rumours, LexisNexis’s United Kingdom & Ireland News & Business Director Bob De Laney has confirmed to VIP that abstracts may replace the previously featured News International content. LexisNexis has been approached by ‘a large global media company’ about carrying its abstracts for certain News International titles, De Laney has told VIP. ‘Negotiations are continuing as we speak,’ he says, ‘but we hope to be able to announce something within a couple of weeks.’ It’s probably fair to say that people have somewhat lost sight of abstracts as a vehicle for news; you have to go back almost 25 years to find a cause célèbre where abstracting was involved. It was around 1986 that the aggregator Textline (an ancestor of Factiva) found itself in dispute with the Financial Times over copyright infringement as a result of its practice (since 1980) of producing lengthy abstracts of FT articles. That dispute was eventually settled in 1987, shortly after Textline’s owner Finsbury Data Services had been acquired by Reuters. But with the FT now operating a rival service to Textline called FT Profile, the differences rumbled on until 1992 (see the Competition Commission’s résumé of the affair at http://digbig.com/5bcfms). It may all seem like ancient history, but there still seem to be plenty of legal grey areas where abstracting is concerned. Ten years after the Textline dispute, the United Kingdom Higher Education Joint Information Systems Committee and Publishers’ Association Guidelines for Fair Dealing in an Electronic Environment advised readers to take legal advice if they intended to create and distribute abstracts based on copyright materials – and also said that the future use of abstracts remained ‘a contentious area’ (http://digbig.com/5bcfmt). LexisNexis makes clear that all of the 6,000-plus current and archival abstracted sources that it carries are licensed in from third parties. De Laney also points out that that ‘abstracts can be highly valuable for those customers who are looking for summarised or translated content’. Too right. Given reporters’ habit of telling their story three times in the same piece, there’s plenty of scope for compression of news content without leaving anything substantive out. [Declaration of interest: Tim Buckley Owen runs training courses on document abstracting.]

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