English: Microsoft Research makes this text available through their website.

This text is The Fourth Paradigm - Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery. I edited and published this unusual edition first here in Wikimedia Commons because the rule here is that media files must not include non-free media. In this "without rights-reserved content edition", I have removed the non-free content which retains copyright restrictions. This makes it possible for the Wikimedia community to engage on-wiki with the free content of this book.

For the purposes of the Wikimedia community we need the content of media files to include only free content. Microsoft has good lawyers but despite their expertise in digital publishing they, as is common everywhere except in the Wikimedia community, find no problem mixing free and non-free work in a publication and labeling the entire work and all its parts with a free license. Of course, only the free media is free, and putting a free label on non-free media does not change the copyright license on those works.

In this edition of the book I have covered over the images which the original editors labeled "all rights reserved", "image courtesy of (whomever)", or otherwise images which seem to come from designers outside of Microsoft Research. The media removal is with blue squares, the first of which I placed over the rights reserved art of the front cover.

I had to make editorial guesses about what was free and nonfree in some cases. On page xviii and 229 there are photos of people with copyright credit to Microsoft Research and the Microsoft Corporation. I am interpreting the free license in the book, which comes in part from Microsoft Research, covers these photos from Microsoft Research and the Microsoft Corporation. On page 234 one of the editors shared their photo of a person. Similarly, since the editor applied a license to the whole work saying that it is free, I interpret that to mean that the photo they shared also has a free license. I am calling these cases out because on page 252 these images have photo credits. Elsewhere in the book there are free and non-free images which have no listing in the credits. The free images, typically graphics done in a style which seems in-house to Microsoft Research matching the design of the book, I kept. The non-free images, which are photos, graphics, and screen captures, I covered with a blue square. It is not apparent to me why the editors listed some image credits but not others. Overall, I interpret an intention that media in the book from Microsoft staff has a free license.

This book is an anthology and various authors wrote the content. To be clear, despite Microsoft sometimes listing image credit and sometimes not, and despite sometimes using free images and sometimes not, I take for granted that everyone submitting content to this anthology understood that their text in the book would have a free license. The content submitters are all experts in the field, and while there is contemporary confusion over free licenses on images, there is much less confusion especially in the professional sector of this publication about negotiating free licenses for scholarly text like this. The text in this book is all free with the Creative Commons license posted.

Anyone who wishes to read the original text should seek it from Microsoft Research. For anyone else who wants a copy in which an editor made a sincere attempt to only include content compatible with free and open licensing, then consider using this one.