New Open Access Criterion: Support access by machines (m2m)
Related to my last posting ( FREE THE ARTICLES! (full-text for researchers & scientists and their machines) ) and in the light of Peter Murray-Rust's recent annoying discovery that he cannot text-mine Pubmed Central ( Can I data- and Text-mine Pubmed Central? ), I would like to suggest an additional criterion to the definition of Open Access: Open Access must include access by machines : At minimum one must allow crawls of the site/content or (to reduce the impact of badly configured crawlers) create a compressed XML file containing all metadata and either content, or direct links to content and make it available for download (and if bandwidth is still an issue put it on a P2P network like BitTorrent ). Preferable is to offer some kind of API (OTMI) or protocol (OAI-PMH) to get at content and metadata and citations. Better is to offer access to the XML of the articles in addition to the PDF and/or HTML; if the XML actually has some semantic content, then we are approaching th...