Barend Mons’s first objective would be ambitious enough for most people: to meld some of the most important biomedical databases into a single information resource. But that’s just the beginning. Mons, a bioinformatician at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, also wants to apply the Wikipedia philosophy. He’s inviting the whole research community to help update a vast store of interlinked data. If he and his colleagues can pull it off — and even the project’s advocates are not sure they can — they could transform the databases that are central to the work of many life scientists.
A test version of the project, provisionally dubbed Wiki for Professionals, is due to launch in the next month. It already contains data from key sources, such as protein information from Swiss- Prot and gene descriptions from Gene Ontology. Over the past year, Mons’s team has woven together these and other archives to create what, from a user’s point of view, seems to be a single database....
But the next stage is the really radical bit. Biomedical research produces hundreds of thousands of papers a year, overwhelming database curators. To clear this bottleneck, Mons and his colleagues are allowing anyone to edit the entries, modifying and adding text and links as new work is published....
A final function, and the one that most excites Mons, is the availability of text-mining software....
[B]asic access will be free. Revenue will be generated by charging drug firms and other users for premium services, such as the option to run a private version of the system incorporating proprietary data....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/15/2007 08:04:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
