> 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.