Reference linking now within reach of open-access journals.

This innovation allows readers to navigate back and forth smoothly between scholarly articles that cite one another. Interestingly, Hubmed is leading commercial publishers here.

Alf Eaton, who put it together:

BioMed Central links. Now here's a real benefit of publishing your paper in an open-access journal. BioMed Central made the full text of all their published articles available for download as XML files, which means that all the sections are marked up and machine-readable, including the author names, titles, PubMed ID numbers and bibliographies. Running a small Perl script through these files, sending Trackbacks from one article to another, lets HubMed now display the full list of references for each article - in both directions. [...] This is a great resource, previously only partially available through a costly subscription (and gnarly interface) to ISI's Web of Knowledge, and a lead which I hope commercial, paid-access publishers will begin to follow as soon as possible. Update: I should have added... [HubLog]

Open Access News:

This is a break-through development. [...] Until now, reference linking was an "inessential" that seemed too expensive to provide for open-access texts. BMC's willingness to provide free XML files as data, and Alf Eaton's programming skill, have changed this and put reference linking within the reach of open-access journals and archives.

As Alf again shows, brains and know-how can sometimes prove an effectively substitute for money. Great job!

[Seb's Open Research]

Having Open Access journals expresssed as XML will open up a tremendous number of new ways to mine the information. The journals (336 of them) published by Highwire Press, out of Stanford, also allow similar reference linking because they are all in the same database. This allows Highwire to use something like Trackback to let you not only link to articles discussed in the current one but also to see more recent articles that have the current articleas a reference. They have been doing this for over 2 years. And, since they are the journals of professional organizations, they may have a little more incentive to work with open source advocates than for-profit publishers. Alreadu many of the Highwire journals make their works open access after a period of time. I guess we could call them semi-Open Access.  9:12:14 AM