FEBS Letters is this month carrying out an interesting experiment that could make literature searching easier for both human and computers....
Structured Digital Abstracts (SDA)...are extensions of the normal journal article abstracts that describe the relationship between two biological entities, mentioning the method used to study the relationship. Each sentence is preceded by one or more identifiers pointing to the corresponding database entries that contain the full details of the interaction e.g. protein A interacts with protein B, by method X.
The aim of SDA is to assist data entry, text mining and literature searching by extracting the salient data from the article into simple sentences using a defined structure and controlled vocabularies....
This is a simple but very good idea and I would certainly appreciate anything that makes literature searching easier.
But I can’t help noting the delicious irony in the title of the first article in the issue that trumpets the arrival of SDA: “Finally: The digital, democratic age of scientific abstracts”.
The first irony is that reading this article on digital democracy requires a subscription to FEBS Letters....
Wouldn’t the flow of information be better served if everyone just published in open access journals?
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/24/2008 01:36:00 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.
