Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

March 4, 2012

Why Are There So Few Efforts to Text Mine the Open Access Subset of PubMed Central?

Filed under: Data Mining,PubMed — Patrick Durusau @ 7:17 pm

Why Are There So Few Efforts to Text Mine the Open Access Subset of PubMed Central? by Casey Bergman.

From the post:

The open access movement in scientific publishing has two broad aims: (i) to make scientific articles more broadly accessible and (ii) to permit unrestricted re-use of published scientific content. From its humble beginnings in 2001 with only two journals, PubMed Central (PMC) has grown to become the world’s largest repository of full-text open-access biomedical articles, containing nearly 2.4 million biomedical articles that can be freely downloaded by anyone around the world. Thus, while holding only ~11% of the total published biomedical literature, PMC can be viewed clearly as a major success in terms of making the biomedical literature more broadly accessible.

However, I argue that PMC has yet catalyze similar success on the second goal of the open-access movement — unrestricted re-use of published scientific content. This point became clear to me when writing the discussions for two papers that my lab published last year. In digging around for references to cite, I was struck by how difficult it was to find examples of projects that applied text-mining tools to the entire set of open-access articles from PubMed Central. Unsure if this was a reflection of my ignorance or the actual state of the art in the field, I canvassed the biological text mining community, the bioinformatics community and two major open-access publishers for additional examples of text-mining on the the entire open-access subset of PMC.

Surprisingly, I found that after a decade of existence only ~15 articles* have ever been published that have used the entire open-access subset of PMC for text-mining research. In other words, less than 2 research articles per year are being published that actually use the open-access contents of PubMed Central for large-scale data mining or sevice provision. I find the lack of uptake of PMC by text-mining researchers to be rather astonishing, considering it is an incredibly rich achive of the combined output of thousands of scientists worldwide.

Good question.

Suggestions for answers? (post to the original posting)

BTW, Casey includes a listing of the articles based on mining of the open-access contents of PubMed Central.

What other open access data sets suffer from a lack of use? Comments on why?

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