At a recent plenary I gave (earlier post) at the Colorado Association of Research Libraries Next Gen Library Interfaces conference, I went a little off-script and was educating (/haranguing) the mostly librarian audience about the present-and-near-future importance of the accessibility of full-text research articles to their researchers and scientists....
I was referring to the machine-accessibility of the text....
I was concerned because of the increasing number of discipline-specific tools that use full-text (& metadata & citations) to allow users (via text mining, semantic analysis, etc.) to navigate, analyze and discover new ideas and relationships, from the research literature. The general label for this kind of research is 'literature-based discovery', where new knowledge hidden in the literature is exposed using text mining and other tools.
Most publisher licenses do not allow for the sort of access to the full-text that many of these discovery tools need.
When I asked for a show of hands of how many were aware of this issue, of the ~200 in the audience, no one raised their hand....
I suggested the following non-mutually-exclusive strategies:
demanding licenses from publishers and aggregators that allow them to offer access to full-text for analysis by arbitrary patron tools
supporting Open Access journals which support much of this this out-of-the-box...
[For example] this study shows how researchers discovered the biochemical pathway involved in drug addiction from the literature alone. They did no experiments. This discovery was derived from an analysis and extraction of information from more than 1000 articles! This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened. Clearly, this sort of analysis can save time and money in discovering important and relevant scientific knowledge.
PS: See my past posts on how OA facilitates meta-analysis and text-mining.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/04/2008 06:28:00 PM.
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.
