FLICKR, JOHN MARTINEZ PAVLIGAIn the United States, like so many countries around the world, scientists are learning to get by on shoestring budgets. Reduced federal funding has the biomedical community looking for ways to squeeze more out of every grant. In an age of austerity, success is about how smart we are with each dollar invested in the country’s research enterprise.
One way to eke more value from those research and development dollars is to extract more knowledge from the scientific data and findings we have already generated. Decades of investment have produced a wealth of information from basic research projects, translational studies, and clinical trials. But we as a community often do not know what is available, and we lack a coherent resource that brings all of this information together—a massive repository that can be queried, or a powerful tool that can gather intelligence from a number of studies at once.
Recent efforts within the open access community are making inroads toward improving access to data and publications, but there remains a general lack of awareness of the existence of relevant data, as well as ...
