We have recently added to novoseek new articles from PubMed Central. This new feature provides the ability to access “full text publications” and we have noticed that there is quite some misunderstanding regarding what has actually been indexed. So let us explain it in detail.

Indeed, we have included the Open Access subset of PubMed Central. What is that? Well, Open Access is the free online access to research papers. Obviously, this definition has driven some confusion and misuse of the term “open” access as it is often considered a synonym to “free” access.

The first definition for open access came up at the Budapest Open Access Initiative which was later revised in Bethesda and Berlin. This led to what Peter Suber calls the BBB open access definition for which most of the Open Access Movement agreed on.
The Open Access definition stands around two ideas:

• Free of charge accessibility
• Tears down permission barriers

Consequently, these ideas make distribution, copying and derivative work production possible to anyone.

Interestingly, we’ve observed that most of the time, open access is used as a synonym to free access. This is not quite correct since open access goes beyond just free access to content. For a better understanding of the differences between them, have a look at the graphic below.

PubMed Central is a free peer reviewed digital archive of biomedical and life sciences literature developed and managed by the NIH. It gives free access to articles among which some are open access. As we have discussed in previous posts, the NIH public access policy has ensured the access to published results of NIH funded research. However it does not say whether it has to be through a free access or an open access policy.

In novoseek, we have analyzed with our text mining algorithms the full text of the open access subset and we have made it public. So now you will find full text articles in which you will be able to highlight all the relevant keywords, and enjoy the great features of our technology.

We hope you like this new data set and we will more than welcome your comments and suggestions.

Old book

Good news!!! Today I have seen that the NIH initiative of public access policy will be made permanent. This is quite some time in a so competitive area as Science. Since the policy was implemented the percentage of manuscript sent to PMC has increase over 3,000 new articles each month.

If the information was overwhelming enough with 2,000 new articles per day -more than 18M scientific articles all together- the free access to full articles will increase the amount of data relevant to biomedicine. This increase is not only on the side of number of articles available but also on the total amount of information since the whole text of the article is going to be accessible. This brings new interesting challenges.

The question now is, how do we get through all the new information fast and efficiently? System that helps get relevant scientific information such as novoseek are more needed than ever.

However, is it really useful for scientists to have the results freely available 1 year behind? Obviously it is not the best possible scenario but the analysis of literature and Grant information could give us an insight on what would be new potential upcoming articles.