Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Friday, October 17, 2003

Text mining

Lisa Guernsey, Digging for Nuggets of Wisdom, New York Times, October 16, 2003 (free registration required). A good peek at the state of the art. (PS: It will always be easier to apply these tools to free online texts than to priced and password-protected texts, unless the tools are hobbled from birth and limited to certain proprietary collections. In the long run there will be a wide array of competing open-source packages with different strengths for different purposes. By making research conclusions in open-access texts stand out from the heap, and connecting them to related open-access research, they will create important incentives to make work openly accessible. If you're a programmer, you can help the cause by creating tools that process open-access texts. If you're a scholar, don't fail to put your work in the open where it is eligible for processing by these tools.)