The Open Access (OA) movement has resulted in millions of scholarly papers becoming freely-available to readers around the World. An often overlooked consequence of this phenomenon is the fact that the images included in a journal article generally also fall under the same licenses that dictate the re-use options for the entire publication.
With the increase in open source literature, having a specialized search engine that can help researchers identify needed OA biomedical images can be extremely helpful. The National Library of Medicine has created just that with its Open-i ® service.
“Open-i service of the National Library of Medicine enables search and retrieval of abstracts and images (including charts, graphs, clinical images, etc.) from the open source literature, and biomedical image collections. Searching may be done using text queries as well as query images. Open-i provides access to over 3.7 million images from about 1.2 million PubMed Central® articles; 7,470 chest x-rays with 3,955 radiology reports; 67,517 images from NLM History of Medicine collection; and 2,064 orthopedic illustrations.”
The available limits that can be applied to refine the search results are quite comprehensive. Limit options include: Article type, Image type/diagnostic imaging modality, Collection/source, License type, Specialty, among other things, and the records can also be field-searched or ranked by research question type (treatment, diagnosis, prognosis, etiology, genetics, etc).
Further reading:
- Demner-Fushman, D., Antani, S., Simpson, M., & Thoma, G. R. (2012). Design and development of a multimodal biomedical information retrieval system. Journal of Computing Science and Engineering, 6(2), 168-177.
- Technical Report (September 2010): Combining Text and Visual Features for Biomedical Information Retrieval