Enabling Public Access to Non-Open Access Biomedical Literature via Idea-Expression Dichotomy and Fact Extraction

The general public shows great potential for utilizing scientific research. For example, a singer discovered her ectopic pregnancy by looking up clinical case reports. However, an exorbitant paywall impedes the public’s access to scientific literature. Our case study on a social network demonstrates a growing need for non-open access publications, especially for biomedical literature. The challenge is that non-open access papers are protected by copyright licenses that bar free distribution. In this paper, we propose a technical framework that leverages the doctrine of "idea-expression dichotomy" to bring ideas across paywalls. Idea-expression dichotomy prevents copyright holders from monopolizing ideas, theories, facts, and concepts. Therefore facts may pass through paywalls unencumbered by copyright license restrictions. Existing fact extraction methods (such as information extraction) require either large training sets or domain knowledge, which is intractable for the diverse biomedical scope spanning from clinical findings to genomics. We therefore develop a rule-based system to represent and extract facts. Social networkers and academics validated the effectiveness of our approach. 7 out of 9 users rated the paper’s information from the facts to be above average (≥6/10). Only 7% of the extracted facts were rated misleading.