Open access citations reduce gaps for machine reading subscription research
The machine use of human beings
Digital Libraries
Summary
Many scientific papers are behind paywalls, so machines can’t directly read all research. The paper shows that machines can still learn a lot from subscription-only papers because open-access papers often cite and summarize them. This process, called human mining, helps machines access knowledge indirectly. Over time, more subscription papers are being cited in open articles faster, reducing the advantage of paid access.
What this means in practice
- •For academic search engine developers: Improve search engine ranking by using open-access citations to infer content from subscription articles.
- •For scholarly database teams: Expand accessible research content by linking subscription articles through open citation networks to open-access literature.
Authors
Daniel W. Hook
Abstract
Research results are prioritised by search engines, large language models and knowledge graphs chiefly through restatement rather than through the originating source. Although the open-access share of annual scholarly output has recently exceeded half, a substantial subscription corpus remains outside what machine readers may legitimately access under prevailing licences. A mechanism is described whereby subscription content is drawn into the open corpus through its citation and restatement in open-access articles---a process termed human mining, by analogy with the text and data mining performed by machines. An optimistic upper bound on what may thereby be inferred by a machine reader confined to the open literature is modelled, and the completeness, latency and licence constraints of that bound are quantified. A majority of subscription articles that have ever been cited is found to be reachable through at least one open citation, and the median interval between a subscription article's publication and its first open citation is shown to have fallen from thirteen years for work of 1990 to one year for work of 2020. The advantage once conferred by direct subscription access to machine readers has thereby been largely eroded, chiefly as a consequence of the growth of open publishing rather than any change in how researchers cite.