There is a Link between literature and data, it has been there for years, but nobody ever found it

The NIH has had a recent request for information about the NIH data catalog to which our group and many others have responded. Many voices including fairly important ones from the white house are now calling for making scientific research data open, available and linked to the publications written about the data. This is a very good thing. It should lead to better handling and comparison of data and better science.

However, sitting in many recent meetings with members of various national libraries, who shall remain nameless, I am astounded to learn that not only the scientists, but also librarians have never found the LinkOut feature in PubMed.

LinkOut is a little option at the bottom of all articles in PubMed hidden by the good staff into complete obscurity, please see the screen shot below if you don't believe me that such a feature exists.

[caption id="attachment_1795" align="alignnone" width="268"] The article above links to two data sets, one is based on OMIM.org a curated set of annotations linking genes to genetic disorders, and the other is the antibodyregistry.org a set of statements about antibody reagents used in this paper. Links from other papers lead to computation model code described in the paper, activation foci or data repositories.[/caption]

Although it is certainly rarely used, the model organism communities, data repositories and researchers, have been diligently adding their data to PubMed in the form of links. We may quibble about the fact that PubMed asks many of us to reduce the specific links to data to generic links that lead to another version of the same article, but the fact is, that the links to data are present! Because they are present, if the National Library of Medicine ever decides to search them, export them, or acknowledge their existence, it would be a treasure trove of data to literature links that would not require a huge new investment in infrastructure.

I am not suggesting that our infrastructure could not be upgraded, in fact we have many more technical gripes that I will not bring up here, but I am suggesting that we all take advantage of the massive investment of time and energy of curators and authors over the last decades to meticulously link their data or data repositories to the literature.

The LinkOut broker has helped NIF aggregate a list of about 250,000 links from ~40 databases, but what PubMed must have is a much much larger set of data. The links provided by NIF can be searched through the NIF site, they can be filtered by category and by database, and they can be extracted and embedded into other sites like science direct (see neuinfo.org/developers). Of these 1/4 million links that we provide to PubMed, between 100 and 200 users find them per month. I think that we can and should do better.

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• We can ask that PubMed makes links to data prominent.

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• We can ask that any links in PubMed be of good quality, e.g., results of text-mining output should not be included without verification by authors or curators.

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• We can ask that the links show actual data as opposed to the representation of the paper in another site (currently required).

If you feel the sudden urge to be an arm-chair activist, then please let PubMed know that it would be nice if they celebrated the current links between data and publications instead of hiding them.