U.S. Energy Department to make researchers' papers free

> The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today unveiled … a Web portal that will link to full-text papers a year after they're published. > Open-access advocates such as University of California, Berkeley, biologist Michael Eisen slammed CHORUS when publishers announced the program it last year. They prefer a full-text government archive like PubMed Central so it is possible to "text mine," or search across the entire body of papers. “Under this [DOE] plan, the public's ability to download, text/data mine, and digitally analyze these articles is severely limited,” SPARC’s Joseph agrees. > But Frederick Dylla … says there is little demand for text mining. He says AIP has never gotten a request for its more than 1 million articles; Elsevier, the publishing giant, gets only about six requests a year, he says. Text mining journal articles is “a field that's just beginning," he says.

12 months is a joke in the timescale of scientific research, most papers already went through up to a year of prep time before publishing. I would like to see a plan that isn't just paying lip service to the ideals of open-access. And Eisen is right about data mining, most journals are terrible in that regard. Even the wonderful arXiv.org doesn't provide citation/reference metadata in their API and they are a groundbreaking leader of the movement. I had to write a scraper to map out an arXiv citation network and there are only a few subfields with enough info to do that. Maybe scientists would make more requests if the APIs were better and the citation information wasn’t copyrighted or obfuscated.

Maybe not so ironic given that the first website in the United States was a DOE project- a DBMS for papers (SPIRES) at SLAC and arXiv.org was born about the same time out of LANL. You used to actually get your papers faxed to you from arXiv.org.

Well, many people might be disappointed at the result. But all things government are complicated, long winded, and are finally decided by people who don't even think they have a clue about it (I hope). Therefore I think every small step is a good step and should be appreciated.

In my university people complained a lot about the first online access to papers as ebooks and pdfs from inside the school's VPN. But nowadays students use it a lot for their studies, thesis work, and research, although it's not much more accessible than 5 years ago. I think it earns some kudos to the people who really made this happen!