BioMed Central, bacause of its Open Access nature, is a prime candidate for fulltext data mining experiments. As noted, the data mining is producing not just research results, but is already incorporated into prior art searches by the European Patent Office.
Since its launch last year, BioMed Central's Open Access XML full text corpus has more than doubled in size, and now comprises more than 5000 articles. It is being used by data-mining researchers all over the world, and is also being put to many other uses. For example, the European Patent Office receives a feed of BioMed Central's XML data and uses it as part of its process of scanning for prior articles relating to patent applications.
In another new development, BioMed Central has just released an XSLT preview stylesheet, which can be used to convert the BioMed Central article XML format into HTML for display purposes. The stylesheet is covered by a Creative Commons license, which allows it to be freely reused, adapted, and redistributed.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
