Review of Quosa

Mark Chillingworth, Quosa's sharing habit will be hard to resist, Information World Review, June 2, 2006. Excerpt:

Quosa is an information management application that offers search, organising and sharing tools for the scientific, technical and medical (STM) online information sources Ovid, PubMed and Google Scholar.

At last year's Online Information show, Quosa was one of the highlights of the Ovid stand, following a deal between the two companies in the autumn. Quosa is basically a desktop plug-in that wraps itself around your browser. It does not replace the search engine of the information source; Quosa's search facilities are text mining tools that let you dig deeply into the content once it has been retrieved.

The main driver for adopting Quosa is its ability to create an information sharing environment. It lets users create virtual libraries of information that other members of a team or organisation can access and share....

You can share the results of your research with your peers by setting up virtual libraries in the My Article Organizer panel. Once you have selected the information you want to save and share, you click on the Save button and set up a folder in your folders list using the same Windows Explorer navigation tools most people are familiar with....[C]lick on the Publish button, choose which library you want to publish to, and it's all done. Everyone in your team who is a member of that library will now have access to your research.

Comment. Interesting product. There are three aspects of OA interest here.

1. When Quosa shares downloaded articles, how does it handle copyright and licensing restrictions? Does it make sure that every user with access to the shared library also has acccess privileges under the relevant license? (What a headache.) If so, does it let users share OA content without any kind of user-authentication?
2. Can Quosa let users share info with the world and not just with lab partners? Apparently not. But if it had a bridge to an OA repository, and not just a private library, then it could easily do so. Of course, that would aggravate the copyright and licensing problems --but only for non-OA content.
3. Like virtually all text-mining tools, Quosa tilts the balance of advantage at least slightly in favor of OA. It may work equally well with free and licensed content (whatever can be downloaded to a browser by a licensed user). But since all users have access to all OA content and only some have access to TA content, Quosa automatically adds utility to all OA content while it only adds utility to TA content for some users. This gives authors and publishers one more incentive to make their work OA, an incentive roughly as large as Quosa is useful. (Quosa would add nothing to the utility of OA content if it did nothing but enable sharing, but don't forget that it also does text mining.)