Category Archives: oa.lens

The Lens Collective Action Project levels the playing field with universal open access to patent and research knowledge.

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“Today The Lens, an Australian-based non-profit and world leader in providing free and open innovation knowledge, announced the Collective Action Project (CAP), a multi-year initiative to equip individuals and institutions with the tools to contribute to shared solutions to these crises. Now, all scientists, investors, publishers, governments, businesses, and civil society can navigate open global research and patent information from over 134 million patent records linked with data from over 236 million research publications and 393 million biological sequences from patents….

What are the key barriers to progress? Jurassic business models.

The ability to discover, measure, map and analyze research and patent knowledge worldwide is big business, estimated at well over US$1.5 billion a year, much of it paid by universities and public institutions. But the real costs are vastly greater: much of the world is excluded from contributing and countless opportunities are lost.

 

“The big corporations that sell this knowledge use closed and siloed data that can’t be shared, making it difficult to build on each other’s work or make informed decisions – the very foundation of how we’ve come so far as a species,” said Mark Garlinghouse, Director of Business Development at The Lens….

The Collective Action Project is guided by the Lens Equitable Access Program (LEAP). The Program charts a pathway towards community-supported autonomous financing of The Lens, to keep it inclusive, growing, open and comprehensive.

Under LEAP, every person in the world can use the platform anonymously for free with powerful analytic tools, and access to all the data. Any registered user can benefit from personalized workspaces and customized features – at no cost for personal public-good users, or for a modest cost for commercial use. Furthermore any institution worldwide that needs or wants suites of powerful management and exploration tools in our Institutional Toolkit will have access based on low, fair, tiered pricing. All fees go towards keeping knowledge universally available as a community-supported public-good. “We announce here that we are offering at no cost these Institutional Toolkits to all public-good institutions across much of the Global South – almost 130 countries – including universities, libraries, government agencies, NGOs and civil society,” said Richard Jefferson….”

The Lens: Open for Outcomes – SPARC

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“The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed fault lines in how we as a society solve important problems. It has shown the urgent need for affordable, open and cooperative action informed by evidence — and inspired by imagination. Science alone doesn’t solve problems; at its best, it answers questions.  Useful solutions require finding, incentivizing, and coordinating many more actors in the innovation system to work together. 

To help facilitate this kind of environment, the Australian-based nonprofit social enterprise, Cambia, created and runs an online open platform called The Lens. It currently hosts 120 million global patent documents linked to a vast searchable database of over 220 million scholarly works and their metadata, compiled and normalized from numerous collaborators and sources, includes Microsoft Academic, PubMed, ORCID, Crossref, CORE, UnPaywall and many others….

Supported by grants from philanthropic organizations (including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Wellcome Trust, Sloan Foundation, Lemelson Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation), the initiative is now positioning itself to displace and supersede proprietary and closed systems from commercial competitors that fragment what could be a community of enterprise and public sector, working to advance outcomes, says Jefferson….”

About The Lens » The Lens awarded $2M USD to strengthen institutional innovation capabilities

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Cambia today announced a $2M USD grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support scaling its prominent open knowledge platform, The Lens, as it launches its institutional toolkits to encourage shared evidence and open data to guide partnering and action for science-based problem solving by institutions….”

SPIE announces partnership with global open-knowledge platform The Lens | EurekAlert! Science News

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“SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, is pleased to announce a partnership with the global open-knowledge platform, The Lens, a robust and comprehensive resource of linked datasets of scholarly and patent works run by Cambia, a long-established global social enterprise.

Under the agreement, all scholarly citation and patent citation data for SPIE publications curated by The Lens will be integrated into the SPIE Digital Library and available to readers. The SPIE Digital Library, the world’s largest collection of optics and photonics applied research, comprises more than 500,000 publications which cover topical areas ranging from biomedical optics and neuroscience, to physics and astronomy-related technology….”

The Lens, platform for innovation cartography, now available through Research4Life

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“We have some great news for innovation professionals and researchers, as The Lens is now available as a resource through all Research4Life programs. What started out as a patent database is now a rich resource of linked information on scholarly communications and innovation. We talked to Osmat Jefferson, Director of Product Development, and Mark Garlinghouse, Director of Business Development at The Lens to find out more!…”

The rise of the “open” discovery indexes? Lens.org, Semantic Scholar and Scinapse | Musings about librarianship oa.scite

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“In this blog post, I will talk specifically on a very important source of data used by Academic Search engines – Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) and do a brief review of four academic search engines – Microsoft Academic, Lens.org, Semantic Scholar and Scinapse ,which uses MAG among other sources….

We live in a time, where large (>50 million) Scholarly discovery indexes are no longer as hard to create as in the past, thanks to the availability of freely available Scholarly article index data like Crossref and MAG.”

6 reasons why you should try Lens.org – Aaron Tay – Medium

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“Lens is in my book one of the most interesting Scholarly discovery/ citation index tools to have emerged in 2018. I am not saying this lightly as 2018 was the year crowded with new discovery services like Dimensions, 1Findr (now acquired by Elsevier), Meta (in closed beta at time of writing) and more.

Owned by the non-profit Cambia, it promises to be free of charge for all (no freemium model) and further more claims to safeguard your privacy with no use of Google Analytics or other cloud based click-trackers.

Of course all this isn’t worth anything if the tool isn’t useful. Given the dominance of Google Scholar as a discovery tool, there seemingly isn’t much room for another discovery tool. But Lens I think is more than just a simple discovery tool, it actually allows you to explore and analyze the data in ways Google Scholar is unable to match, thanks to a blend of powerful filters, facets , customizable visualization capability and bulk export functions….”

Lens.org – detailed review of a new open discovery and citation index | Musings about librarianship

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“I first read about Lens.org via a tweet on my way back from a conference in April 2018. There seemed to be something in the water at the time, as they was an explosion of new discovery services and idexes in the past few months, including Digital science’s Dimensions, 1Science’s 1Findr, Scilit and the new resurgent challenge to Google Scholar posed by Microsoft Academic….

I have come to realise that Lens might in fact be a far more exciting development than I thought.

While it is true that the scholarly search portion of Lens might be perhaps mostly dominated by the voluminous data from Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG), Lens is far more than the sum of it’s parts by combining open data from half a dozen open data sources.

The other significant thing about Lens that differentiates it from the other search discovery and citation indexes is that it is run by Cambia a non-profit that seems committed to produce a open, free to use alternative to commerically owned and licensed indexes….”