Industry Voices: In Pursuit of Scientific Hive Mind

A vocal and active scientific community is clamoring for unrestricted access to scholarly works, a movement known as "open access", while journal publishers largely resist the call. For a reasoned and nuanced commentary, check out EMBO Director Maria Leptin's 3/16 editorial in the journal Science. Oh wait, you can't--it's behind AAAS' pay wall.  But why is open access important? And even if it becomes a reality, what will we do with all of that information once we get it? While perceptions of fairness, equity and morality drive much of the open access groundswell, perhaps the greatest imperative is that of maximizing Public Knowledge. Fueled by this wealth of information, new social platforms and semantic search/mining technologies are poised to change the way that science is conducted, communicated and understood...