The document discusses efforts to aggregate open access research papers from various global systems for improved text and data mining. It highlights challenges such as standardization, inconsistent implementations, and legal issues that hinder seamless access. The conclusion emphasizes the need for overcoming these challenges to enable effective text-mining applications that can enhance research methodologies.

1. Aggregating Research Papers from Publishers’
Systems to Support Text and Data Mining
Deliberate Lack of Interoperability or
Not?
@openminted_eu
Dr. Petr Knoth
Knowledge Media institute, The Open University
United Kingdom
@petrknoth

2. Goal
Achieve seamless harmonised access to full
texts of open access research papers
originating from thousands of systems around
the world for machines to process and extract
knowledge from.
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3. What are we doing
@openminted_eu
- Aggregating full texts of open access
research papers from all over the world
- Institutional, subject-based open
repositories & journals
- Publisher systems
- Pre-processing millions of research papers,
making them ready to text-mine (API, data
dumps)
- Working with researchers around the world
to extract knowledge from these data

4. Challenges
@openminted_eu
- Standardisation (OAI-PMH, ResourceSync,
bespoke APIs, nothing, etc.)
- Inconsistent implementation of standards
(referencing of full-texts from metadata,
variation in fields’ semantics, OpenAIRE
guidelines/RIOXX, etc.)
- Lack of incentives to adopt standards +
legal & ethical issues
- Scalability (due to in-adequate standards)
or bad practices (Robots exclusion, etc.)

5. Approach
@openminted_eu
- Surveying publishers for machine
accessibillity of OA content and technically
validating their answers
- Encouraging providers to follow good
practices (validation tools, advocacy)
- Implementing connectors to publishers
systems
- Addressing scalability issues
- Pragmatic approach

6. Conclusion
Seamless access to world’s research papers is
needed to enable the creation of text-mining
applications that will transform the way we do
research.
While we have already managed to provide this
for millions of research papers, we are still
facing a number of technical, organisational,
legal and ethical challenges in making seamless
machine access to world’s research papers a
reality.
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