Friday, August 01, 2008

Closed Access Award #2: Andrey Rzhetsky, Michael Seringhaus and Mark Gerstein

Just got pointed to a new paper by someone near and dear to me. In this paper (Seeking a New Biology through Text Mining), Andrey Rzhetsky, Michael Seringhaus and Mark Gerstein seem to argue for the importance of text mining for the future of biology research. Text mining is indeed an important new tool in biology. Of course, it works best if you have access to the text. Alas, I would tell you more about their paper, but I have been out sick and stuck at home, and I do not have access to their paper, which was published in Cell. And thus, even without seeing their paper, I am giving them my second "Closed Access Award" for apparently outlining a path for a new biology that will be only available to some, not all.

3 comments:

  1. true of course, and obvious no doubt to the authors. But publishing a pro-access piece in Cell is equivalent to getting Chomsky published in National Review -- rather than preaching to the choir and running yet another pro-access comment in plos or bmc, they placed this one in the very heart of the problem, as it were. Quite subversive -- I wonder if cell knew what they accepted.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have to go with anonymous on this one -- it is, after all, a commentary article. I notice that Rzhetsky and Gerstein are both on boards of PLoS and BioMed Central journals -- they clearly don't think open-access is unimportant.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Not so sure about the subversive part. Certainly, these authors are on the right side of OA much of the time. I would only buy the "subversive" argument if within their article they address somehow the issue of OA. Since I cannot read the article, I just do not know.

    ReplyDelete

Most recent post

My Ode to Yolo Bypass

Gave my 1st ever talk about Yolo Bypass and my 1st ever talk about Nature Photography. Here it is ...