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At a recent plenary I gave [ earlier post ] at the Colorado Association of Research Libraries Next Gen Library Interfaces conference, I went a little off-script and was educating (/haranguing) the mostly librarian audience about the present-and-near-future importance of the accessibility of full-text research articles to their researchers and scientists. By accessibility of full-text I didn't mean the ability of a human to access the PDF or HTML of an article via a web browser: I was referring to the machine- accessibility of the text contained in the article (and the metadata and the citation information). I was concerned because of the increasing number of discipline-specific tools that use full-text (& metadata & citations) to allow users (via text mining, semantic analysis, etc.) to navigate, analyze and discover new ideas and relationships, from the research literature. The general label for this kind of research is ' literature-based discovery ', where new ...

The article When Is Open Access Not Open Access? (CJ MacCallum) PLoS Biology examines the slippery activities of publishers that try and fly the flag of Open Access (with varying degrees of capitalization) but who only offer the free-as-in-beer definition of freedom, as opposed to the Open Access definition, which includes --- as well as free- gratis freedom -- extensive intellectual property rights permitting unrestricted derivative use. This issue and these distinctions were discussed earlier this year in " Free but not open? " at the PLoS blog. I have noticed that many journals use the weasel words like " We conform to open access as defined by SHERPA ". The SHERPA definition does not include the extensive IP rights described by Open Access: By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of...