Open access and mashups

"The mashup I looked at more closely is called iSpecies, and it effectively behaves as a highly specialized search engine, although there is a considerable amount of information correlation happening behind the scenes because all of the other sources being used are actively consulted in real-time. You enter a taxonomically precise species name – let’s suppose it is Cordyceps unilateralis – and then the service mashes together open access information about that species by including the Wikipedia entry, the genomics data from NCBI (the National Center for Biotechnology Information), a global map of the range of the species courtesy of GBIF (the Global Biodiversity Information Facility), as well as images from Yahoo and articles from Google Scholar....I suspect that such projects, and mashups in general, would get a huge boost if all blocks to information access were removed. If greater quantities of research data were to be placed in the public domain, then the kinds of search applications that support mashups could directly sift through them. This could have far-reaching consequences for the way in which new scientific discoveries might be made, especially by uncovering patterns and associations previously undetected...."