Text mining for biology - the way forward: opinions from leading scientists

This article collects opinions from leading scientists about how text mining can provide better access to the biological literature, how the scientific community can help with this process, what the next steps are, and what role future BioCreative evaluations can play. The responses identify several broad themes, including the possibility of fusing literature and biological databases through text mining; the need for user interfaces tailored to different classes of users and supporting community-based annotation; the importance of scaling text mining technology and inserting it into larger workflows; and suggestions for additional challenge evaluations, new applications, and additional resources needed to make progress

Non-commercial journals: the role of the scientific societies

Conclusions of the breakout session "Non-commercial journals: the role of the scientific societies". A wide-ranging discussion led to the conclusion that `non-commercial’ indicates primarily a low-cost e-publishing activity. The publishers are academic / research organizations, or low-cost commercial publishers acting on their behalf. Publication was viewed as an integral part of the research effort, and within this context, ‘hidden-cost’ publishing activities carried out by academic organizations were regarded as admissible

E-BioSci: Semantic networks of biological information

Searching for specific pieces of information scattered across multiple articles in the full text literature or other databases, demands computer-based tools to aid the human expert. Such tools must cope with the complexities of natural language(s), be capable of unambiguous recognition of the idiosyncratic gene and other symbols devised by scientists and deal with a variety of other linguistic complications. As part of the response to this challenge, EMBO took the lead to create the E-BioSci network, a scientific information service that will interlink genomic and other factual or image data with the life sciences research literature. The service will be developed together with partners from different research institutions across Europe and will receive financial support from the European Commission for the coming three years. The prototype currently under construction facilitates intelligent searching of full text, document-neighbouring based on semantic content, cross-repository searching and cross-language searching. It permits recognition of gene and protein symbols in full text with an indication of database lookup services available. Future versions will provide graphical representation of semantic relationships between documents and entities retrieved in searches. The textual version of this presentation at the Conference "Open Access to Scientific and Technical Information: State of the Art and Future Trends" (Paris, 23-24 January 2003) was published in "Information Services and Use" vol. 23 (2003), issue 2-3, p. 179-182

E-BioSci a platform for e-publishing and information integration in the life sciences

The paper publication is becoming simply a summary pointer to the electronic version

Access for all?

While initiatives for self-archiving and creating new open access journals gain momentum, new questions about the legal and economic basis of scientific publishing aris