OpenCon 2015 Brussels was an amazing event. I’ll save a summary of it for the weekend but in the mean time, I urgently need to discuss something that came up at the conference. At OpenCon, it emerged that Elsevier have apparently been blocking Chris Hartgerink’s attempts to access relevant psychological research papers for content mining. No one can doubt that Chris’s research intent is legitimate – he’s not fooling around here.

This week saw the release of two tools from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, CiteBank and the BHL-Europe portal. Both have actually been quietly around for a while, but were only publicly announced last week. In developing a new tool there are several questions to ask. Does something already exist that meets my needs? If it doesn't exist, can I build it using an existing framework, or do I need to start from scratch?

I think this isn't supposed to happen, but here's a paper with two DOIs. The first DOI is doi:10.1651/0278-0372(1997)17[253:MPAOTC]2.0.CO;2, which links to a record served by BIOONE.