•Project/idea
Progress in science depends on researchers being aware of new research
results. Nowadays, researchers, each person on her own, are searching
PubMed. I have created a tool "bims: Biomed News". It aims to innovate
in two ways: (1) replacing searching with learning and (2)
disseminating the results. The basic system is aimed at users who are
subject experts. They monitor the appearance of new papers in PubMed
on their topic of interest every week. Over time, they maintain a
report on their topic. We help selectors by sophisticated use of
machine learning. Over a few weeks of learning, our users find that
our selections are more flexible and more precise than PubMed
searches. They do a better current awareness job. However, it's
important to note that the benefits of learning are not yet apparent
when you start a report. At that point, there is nothing yet to learn
from. This explains the slow growth in uptake of Bims.
The system lives at http://biomed.news. My project director and I have
a small but dedicated group of expert selectors. It's rare for a
selector to leave. All data we produce is fully open. We don't yet
have an email dissemination to notify report readers. We are waiting
for a sponsor to start that. At this time, the report issues are only
sent to selectors by email. We aim for a full expertise sharing system.
When there is wide dissemination, we can see three benefits.
(1) Bims will be a step forward to democratise access to knowledge. Even
today, most people can get access to papers even when they are behind a
paywall, just by writing to the authors. But many people do not know what
papers to get.
(2) Bims will be a step forward for the emerging preprint efforts in the
biomedical arena. Preprints have the disadvantage that they are not
classified by topic-specific journals.
(3) Bims can help in the fight against fake science. It is harder to dupe
an expert.
•Your skills and experience
python, (1 year), XSLT (12 years), SVM text machine learning (15 years),
Perl (25 years), full linux system administration, including email (25
years), academic publishing (25 years). I run my own web site at
http://openlib.org/home/krichel rather than relying on commercial tools
such as Twitter, Github and/or LinkedIn.
•I am interested in participating in the Innovation Sprint because…
Since I am not a life scientist, I have been working on this in
comparative isolation in Siberia without dedicated resources. The
meeting would be an important networking opportunity. Bims is not just
free to use. It is an open tool in the sense that it exports the
results in bulk. Therefore its results can be built into the work
of other projects.
•Tell us about something you have created that you are proud of:
I am a veteran open-access activist. In April 1993, when I was a lecturer
in economics, I published the first online academic paper in economics.
This was the start of my WoPEc collection of economics working papers. In
1997, I morphed WoPEc into the RePEc digital
library, see
http://repec.org.
I continue to coordinate RePEc. RePEc has
kept the economics working papers alive. Computer science is the other
discipline that used to have working papers. There, the use of working
papers has essentially disappeared, depriving the community from an
self-organized open access scholarly communications layer.
•Have you been or are you currently involved with eLife?
I was on the community call on 2018‒10‒24. I submitted feedback on this on
2018‒10‒25. I registered for the 2019‒06‒24 call.
•What gender do you identify as?
Male
•How do you
identify your ethnicity?
Saarlander
•Where would you expect to be travelling from
in September 2019?
Siberia