I came across it briefly earlier this month thanks to the blog of medical librarian David Rothman, who described it as "A supercool way to search PubMed Central", which is a pretty good description!
As the homepage of PubMed Central notes, "All the articles in PMC are free (sometimes on a delayed basis). Some journals go beyond free, to Open Access". Because Open Access explicitly allows the reuse of the content of the articles in these journals (which include all 170+ BioMed Central journals) this has allowed the BioText people to create a search engine that allows keyword searching of abstracts, figure legends, titles and authors, returning results sorted by date and relevance, and in two formats: abstracts with figure thumbnails and legends, or figure legends with thumbnails....
Anna hinted at upcoming functions such as returning snippets that match the search terms from the full text of the article (much as Google Scholar does). We look forward to these further developments, and we'd like to thank Anna, Marti Hearst and the others on the BioText team for developing such a useful and user friendly tool. This is a great example of how Open Access allows others to make further use of published work, in ways that the authors or publishers had not anticipated.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/01/2007 11:44:00 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.