Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Monday, January 29, 2007

OA because it supports mirrors, mashups, and mining

Matt Hodgkinson, Mashups, mirrors, mining, and open access, Journalology, January 28, 2007.  Excerpt:

The Creative Commons Attribution License under which open access articles are made available by both BioMed Central and PLoS allows others to create sites that incorporate the content of these articles, so long as the original source is clearly acknowledged.  Two ways to do this are mashups and mirrors....

BioMed Central officially has four mirrors....

On the mashup side, Free Biomedical Images has made open access images available in a searchable database, mainly (entirely?) taken from BioMed Central articles, and fully attributed. Users can comment on the images, rate them, email them to a friend and jump to the published article.

A key feature of open access is that we don't hide away the full text of our articles. The entire 'corpus' of our open access research articles is available on our data mining page for anyone to download. Gerry Rubin has said that "the most important reason for Open Access is data mining".

The idea of mashups, scripts and extensions is just beginning to reach the bioinformatics community. A bioinformatics mashup by Alfonso Valencia is iHOP (Information Hyperlinked over Proteins), which links information about genes and proteins to text from PubMed. Not satisfied with just a mashup, Mark Wilkinson has created a Greasemonkey userscript called iHOPerator that enhances the iHOP website with tag clouds. You can read about in his BMC Bioinformatics article. Two other Greasemonkey userscripts link PubMed to social bookmarking sites, one to CiteULike, the other to Connotea. A third links Google Scholar to CiteULike. The iSpecies search engine pulls together information about any species you enter from disparate sources, including scores of biomedical databases and even Yahoo! Image search....