Mining the astronomical literature (A clever data project shows the promise of open and freely accessible academic literature) by Alasdair Allan.
From the post:
There is a huge debate right now about making academic literature freely accessible and moving toward open access. But what would be possible if people stopped talking about it and just dug in and got on with it?
NASA’s Astrophysics Data System (ADS), hosted by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), has quietly been working away since the mid-’90s. Without much, if any, fanfare amongst the other disciplines, it has moved astronomers into a world where access to the literature is just a given. It’s something they don’t have to think about all that much.
The ADS service provides access to abstracts for virtually all of the astronomical literature. But it also provides access to the full text of more than half a million papers, going right back to the start of peer-reviewed journals in the 1800s. The service has links to online data archives, along with reference and citation information for each of the papers, and it’s all searchable and downloadable.
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The existence of the ADS, along with the arXiv pre-print server, has meant that most astronomers haven’t seen the inside of a brick-built library since the late 1990s.
It also makes astronomy almost uniquely well placed for interesting data mining experiments, experiments that hint at what the rest of academia could do if they followed astronomy’s lead. The fact that the discipline’s literature has been scanned, archived, indexed and catalogued, and placed behind a RESTful API makes it a treasure trove, both for hypothesis generation and sociological research.
That’s the trick isn’t it? “…if they followed astronomy’s lead.”
The technology used by the astronomical community has been equally available to other scientific, technical, medical and humanities disciplines.
Instead of ADS, for example, the humanities have JSTOR. JSTOR is supported by funds that originate with the public but the public has no access.
An example of how a data project reflects the character of the community that gave rise to it.
Astronomers value sharing of information and data, therefore their projects reflect those values.
Other projects reflect other values.
Not a question of technology but one of fundamental values.