The Open Access Week Challenge

[Jennifer McLennan]

This year’s OAWeek preparations kick off with a challenge to researchers from Dr. Philip E. Bourne, Professor of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego and Founding Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Computational Biology. In a video posted to the OA Week Web site, Bourne calls upon scholars to think beyond free and ready access to the literature – made possible by Open Access – and consider how technology may be deployed to advance research, to truly mine the increasing amount of available literature.

He points to two of his projects: SciVee.tv, a mashup of traditional open-access content with rich media; and UCSD’s BioLit, an initiative to “extract database identifiers and rich meta-data from open-access articles in the life sciences and integrate that information with existing biological databases.” Neither initiative would be possible without full Open Access to the content, without the full text of the scholarly record being openly available and searchable in XML format. Both are contributing to the advancement of science in wholly new, expedient ways. SciVee, which serves up thousands of videos, draws 60,000 unique users per month, and article-level metrics demonstrate greater usage of articles that have been “pub-casted.”

Bourne cites the over 1,000,000 papers being added to PubMed Central (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc) each year, adding “the idea that we’ll be able to keep up with that is just untenable. To actually make full use of the literature, we’re going to require tools to help us.” And, the opportunity to deploy necessary tools is only possible when the full text of the literature is openly available and searchable. Dr. Bourne’s video is available at http://www.openaccessweek.org/video/open-access-week-2010-a.

RESEARCHERS, how has Open Access enhanced your work? Share experiences and projects that demonstrate the power of Open Access to enable the Web and advance discovery at http://www.openaccessweek.org.