The Open Access movement reserves the right to re-use the peer reviewed literature: translation, republication, annotation and analysis. This talk will lay out a specific re-use of the open literature – extracting a set of annotations and republishing those annotations for use in analysis software. The volume of scholarly literature is such that it is now becoming critical to use automated approaches to manage the information, and copyrights can have a significant chilling effect on this usage. Science Commons is building a test case in this area called the Neurocommons, and the talk will lay out the key elements of the project.

Using natural language processing and other automated technologies, we are extracting machine-readable representations of neuroscience-related knowledge as contained in Open Access Literature and taxpayer-funded databases. We use standard Semantic Web markup languages to assemble those representations into a ‘graph’ that we re-publish with no intellectual property rights or contractual restrictions on reuse. Our goal is to demonstrate that the rights of re-use, combined with new technologies, can dramatically increase the value of knowledge on the web.

About the speakers

  • John Wilbanks

    Executive Director of the Science Commons project at Creative Commons

    John Wilbanks is the Executive Director of the Science Commons project at Creative Commons. He came to Creative Commons from a Fellowship at the World Wide Web Consortium in Semantic Web for Life Sciences. Previously, he founded and led to acquisition Incellico, a bioinformatics company that built semantic graph networks for use in pharmaceutical research and development.