Announcing the PLOS Text Mining Collection | EveryONE

"Text Mining is an interdisciplinary field combining techniques from linguistics, computer science and statistics to build tools that can efficiently retrieve and extract information from digital text. Over the last few decades, there has been increasing interest in text mining research because of the potential commercial and academic benefits this technology might enable. However, as with the promises of many new technologies, the benefits of text mining are still not clear to most academic researchers. This situation is now poised to change for several reasons. First, the rate of growth of the scientific literature has now outstripped the ability of individuals to keep pace with new publications, even in a restricted field of study. Second, text-mining tools have steadily increased in accuracy and sophistication to the point where they are now suitable for widespread application. Finally, the rapid increase in availability of digital text in an Open Access format now permits text-mining tools to be applied more freely than ever before. To acknowledge these changes and the growing body of work in the area of text mining research, today PLOS launches the Text Mining Collection, a compendium of major reviews and recent highlights published in the PLOS family of journals on the topic of text mining. As one of the major publishers of the Open Access scientific literature, it is perhaps no coincidence that research in text mining in PLOS journals is flourishing. As noted above, the widespread application and societal benefits of text mining is most easily achieved under an Open Access model of publishing, where the barriers to obtaining published articles are minimized and the ability to remix and redistribute data extracted from text is explicitly permitted. Furthermore, PLOS is one of the few publishers who is actively promoting text mining research by providing an open Application Programming Interface to mine their journal content ... Over the years, PLOS has published several reviews, opinions, tutorials and dozens of primary research articles in this area in PLOS Biology, PLOS Computational Biology and, increasingly, PLOS ONE. Because of the large number of text mining papers in PLOS journals, we are only able to highlight a subset of these works in the first instance of the PLOS Text Mining Collection. These include major reviews and tutorials published over the last decade [1-6], plus a selection of research papers from the last two years [7-19] and three new papers arising from the call for papers for this collection [20-22] ... As this is a living collection, it is worth discussing two issues we hope to see addressed in articles that are added to the PLOS text mining collection in the future: scaling up and opening up. While application of text mining tools to abstracts of all biomedical papers in the MEDLINE database is increasingly common, there have been remarkably few efforts that have applied text mining to the entirety of the full text articles in a given domain, even in the biomedical sciences [4][23]. Therefore, we hope to see more text mining applications scaled up to use the full text of all Open Access articles. Scaling up will maximize the utility of text-mining technologies and the uptake by end users, but also demonstrate that demand for access to full text articles exists by the text mining and wider academic communities.  Likewise, we hope to see more text-mining software systems made freely or openly available in the future. As an example of the state of affairs in the field, only 25% of the research articles highlighted in the PLOS text mining collection at launch provide source code or executable software of any kind [13, 16, 19, 21]. The lack of availability of software or source code accompanying published research articles is, of course, not unique to the field of text mining ..."