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Suppose I want to provide "smart" (AI, meaning extraction etc.) search over many published papers (specifically, biological) to simplify researchers' live.

Now, I have access to my university library that contains text of many papers from different sources, including those with payed subscription.

Is it legal to download all papers, analyse them and provide search without disclosing full text of the paper, only small part of text or image and with proper citation?

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    At a minimum it is probably against your library's terms of use of their resources, and it probably violates intellectual property restrictions to do it on that scale without permission. For example, for Google to be able to search a journal for indexing on Google Scholar, the journal has to give Google permission (though it typically goes the other way: journals are approaching Google asking them to index).
    – Bryan Krause ♦
    Commented Jul 29, 2017 at 21:51
  • Bulk automated downloading is a great way to violate terms and conditions of access for most legitimate resources...
    – Jon Custer
    Commented Jan 19, 2021 at 20:09

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I do not see any problems with it as long as you disclose your methodical approach and as long as your university library's terms allow such a behaviour (which is doubted by Bryan Krause in the comments). Perhaps it is best to ask your university library just to make sure.

If the concerns hold, you could alternatively use open datasets of full-text scholarly publications. Just to name three examples:

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