We've just put a chapter that I've written speculating about the interactions between the emerging technologies of text mining, the licensing of scholarly journals in electronic form, and open access on the CNI web site. This is available as an HTML file or a PDF as the first entry on

http://www.cni.org/staff/clifford_publications.html

The chapter was written as part of a forthcoming book on open access edited by Neil Jacobs of JISC. You can find information about the (hardcopy) book at:

http://www.chandospublishing.com/catalogue/record_detail.php?recordID=103


Many of the other chapters have been archived in various institutional repositories or available through author web sites, and a number have already been featured on Peter Suber's invaluable Open Access News blog (see http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html); it looks like this is going to be a very valuable snapshot of international open access developments as of mid-2006.

Recently, there have been some very interesting developments as various parts of the scholarly publishing community engage questions related to text mining technologies. Of particular interest is the work of the Nature Publishing group on the Open Text Mining Interface (OTMI). For a description of this work, see

http://blogs.nature.com/wp/nascent/2006/04/open_text_mining_interface.html

The recent Nature editorial at

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v440/n7088/full/4401090a.html

will also be of interest.

I expect that CNI will be exploring  many of these questions further in future programmatic work.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI