How AI can benefit Open Science movement
The internet has revolutionized our lives, giving us instant access to vast amounts of information. The exponential increase of knowledge together with technology improvements contributed to the creation of the Open Science movement. Artificial Intelligence has a chance to help researchers with processing the abundance of knowledge available today.
Open Science movement
Open Science consists of scholarly communications (Open Access, OA), research data (Open Data), and the protocols and other software tools that gather and process the data (Open Source). It aims to make all scientific products generated by research activities (e.g. scientific literature, research data, software, experiments) available for everyone as soon as possible. In recent years, it has become accepted that open access is a desirable and viable publication model for papers. Open Access benefits researchers, institutions, nations and society as a whole. Today, Open Access journals not only rank among the world’s largest in terms of numbers of articles published, but also among the most influential in terms of citations received. But the more the Open Science movement grows with increasingly large amounts of data available, the more complicated it becomes to utilize it effectively. In this article we will focus on scholarly articles – Open Access.
Artificial Intelligence to the rescue
Digitization of knowledge is the future of science. Artificial Intelligence has great potential and opportunities for making this knowledge overflow more manageable. More and more researchers are looking for solutions to find the right articles fast and analyze them. Searching for hours or days for the right documents, analyzing them, extracting the data needed… it all can be overwhelming and incredibly time consuming. While humans can get tired from reading large amounts of information, the machine can faster, better and without losing focus.
AI offers the promise of finding and transforming the data into valuable insights. The modern technologies have the potential to make high quality materials readily discoverable even when they would be challenging to find through the traditional distribution channels.
More and more tools are being developed to help researchers discover previously hidden information.
Our Approach
At Iris.ai, we are a big advocate for making all the world’s knowledge available to everyone. We believe that there’s a great deal of undiscovered and untapped information hidden in these articles. We believe that if one human could sit down, read all of the scientific knowledge available and draw conclusions, we would solve a lot of problems right then and there. Maybe a biologist discovered a plant with certain characteristics that could be used as an alternative to plastic or help in alternative medicines? Our goal is to help researchers make sense of existing knowledge fast and effectively.
Iris.ai Researcher Workspace is an AI-based platform for document processing.
It provides smart search and a wide range of smart filters, reading list analysis, auto-generated summaries, autonomous extraction, and systematizing of data. It’s an invaluable companion to researchers, with the ability to do inference and find new solutions from a vast body of scientific knowledge. Iris.ai allows humans to focus on value creation by saving 75% of a researcher’s time, doing specialized, interdisciplinary field analysis to an above human level of accuracy.
The Researcher Workspace has integrated multiple databases:
- >100 million open access papers via core.ac.uk,
- Open Access and Paywalled papers from PubMed,
- USPTO patents via PatentsView
- CORD-19, the Allen Institute hosted COVID-19 dataset
The researchers can search through these databases with their own problem statement and the machine will find the most relevant articles.
Unfortunately there are still many paywalled databases which we cannot integrate in our tools, but now researchers can upload their own dataset either from an external folder or from their reference manager.
Amongst our clients we work with a Californian research group, funded by the Canadian government, who is searching broadly for new drug candidates from western, Chinese and herbal medicine for a specific medical situation or we work with a start-up extracting data from documents to find candidates for creating sustainably-sourced biomaterials, made from locally-abundant natural ingredients.
The Open Science movement together with emerging new technologies to manage knowledge are the future to scientific development and new discoveries.
Key Takeaways
👉 Open Science consists of Open Access, Open Data and Open Source
👉 Artificial Intelligence has great potential and opportunities for making this knowledge overflow more manageable.
👉 Iris.ai tools help researchers save time on finding the right articles, analyze the list, summarize the findings and extract the data.
Want to know more about the Researcher Workspace? Get in touch!