Open Access News

David Lipman [is the] director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, part of the National Library of Medicine, which hosts various life sciences databases, including the PubMed scientific literature database....

Some people view Google, etc., as increasingly useful research tools in the life sciences, joining PubMed and other established services. What is your opinion?

Lipman: People sometimes have this a bit backwards. The primary point is that there is a huge amount of information on the Web. The best way to make the Web more useful for research and education is to get more information out there. What we find on our site is that the more good-quality content that we add to a resource, the more it is being used. If you have more gene sequencing data, you have more searching. If you have more full text in PubMed Central, you have more searching. While I want to give MSN and Yahoo and Google a lot of credit for doing a good job, the reality is that if there wasn’t content there, it wouldn’t matter how good those search engines were. And if the search engines were a little less good than they were, you would still be getting to a lot of good content... And if those search engines got better, it wouldn’t make as much of a difference as if there was more good peer-reviewed medical content. That would make a bigger impact....

Are you talking about identifying search patterns from users so you can surface links they might be interested in?

If you did a search on, say, Alzheimer's disease, and you find a PubMed record that looks interesting to you … right now you go to that page and we may have done an incredible amount of work to link that up to all kinds of things – to information about genes that might be involved, to genetic versions of it, to related articles. And the reality is you have to poke around to see that – it’s sort of hidden in a way. What we’ll do instead is, using computational tools, poke around for you and then put them right on the record....The bottom line for us is discovery. We want people to make discoveries....

Is there a specific initiative tied to these improvements?

Yes. I call it the Discovery Initiative. It’s something new. It’s been percolating. Last summer, I went out to visit Google and Amazon’s A9 [search engine] and the folks from Microsoft’s MSN came to visit. I also went up to Boston to meet with folks from the major hospitals there and MIT and Harvard. We’ve really been giving this a lot of thought. In many ways, we have had great success. Lots of people use the site and 2.25 terabytes of data are downloaded from our site everyday. And yet I find it very frustrating because we’ve connected up the scientific information in very precise and powerful ways: a protein structure to the chemical it’s bound to, to genetic data, you name it. All that is connected up. And yet very few of our users do more than very simple things with our site....We want them to find answers to questions they didn’t even know they had. They can do that. People who are really experts at using this site can make discoveries almost on demand....We’ve always been working on making incremental improvements, but now I’m talking about something that is a more powerful shift. I’m hoping that without the users having to think about having to learn anything different, they’ll be able to take advantage of databases they didn’t know about and [make] connections between things they don’t have to ask for anymore. This is a new phase.