The internet was originally created for the distribution of academic information, but decades later much of the scholarly work produced is not easily accessible. Fortunately, many disparate efforts in the open access movement are working to change that. AI2 formed the Open Academic Search (OAS) working group to accelerate the pace of progress for groups engaged in these efforts.
Working in silos means duplication of foundational pieces and time and resources wasted. For example, anyone working on an academic search solution needs to parse and normalize metadata from PDFs, which means everyone has developed a different solution to this problem. What’s the best way and how much better could it be if we collaborated on a single solution?
Researchers rely on a comprehensive knowledge graph of authors and papers created from citations in order to assess impact and attribute scientific work; this is a foundational component of any academic search system today. But as machine reading improves and academic search grows more sophisticated, there are endless possibilities for building on and adding value to this foundation. Through collaboration we can openly share author-paper data and build our unique solutions on top of it to accelerate research.
OAS Core Principles
- Collaboration drives academic search innovation.
- AI can play a unique role in surfacing and analyzing information contained in millions of online research papers and academic journals.
- Our core mission is advancing the pace of research and aiding breakthroughs in critical research areas.
We’ve assembled an advisory board of like-minded influencers in the academic search space for the benefit of their expertise and collective mindshare. Members come from both nonprofit and for-profit organizations, many of whom already participate in other open access initiatives. The key focus of this particular effort is on technology and data to support academic search and discovery. Our long-term goal is to ensure the longevity and long-term viability of academic search systems.
One of the biggest challenges for research scientists is staying informed of the latest developments with the ever increasing pace of global scientific output. Members of the OAS working group have already put useful tools into the public domain to help with this challenge. The group will also identify new opportunities for collaboration that build on openly available technologies and data sets to speed the pace of innovation in academic search.
To show our commitment to this cause, the Semantic Scholar team has recently released several tools to accelerate innovation in academic search:
For more information and a comprehensive list of resources see the OAS webpage.
