Author: Marti Hearst
Position: Associate Professor
Institution: University of California, Berkeley
E-mail: hearst@ischool.berkeley.edu
Submitted Date: October 31, 2007
Published Date: November 1, 2007
This comment was originally posted as a “Reader Response” on the publication date indicated above. All Reader Responses are now available as comments.

I applaud the sentiments expressed in Dr. MacCallum's piece "When Is Open Access Not Open Access?"

Our BioText literature search project is an example of an application that is possible only with the fully open access license. This interface allows researchers to search over the full text of documents, allowing the user to see search results drawn from the body of the text (not just the abstracts). The interface also searches over the text of figure and table captions, as well as the text in the tables themselves. Finally, the interface shows the figures directly in the search results, which should make it easier for searchers to assess article relevance. This kind of use of intellectual property is not possible with the more restrictive access rights.

Try it out at:
http://biosearch.berkeley...

Marti Hearst