OpenSciInfo

Well, not entirely limited to libraries. Useful stuff for visualization practitioners sounded a little non-specific, though. These are all freely available.

BioMart is a query-oriented data management system developed jointly by the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OiCR) and the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). The system can be used with any type of data and is particularly suited for providing 'data mining' like searches of complex descriptive data. BioMart comes with an 'out of the box' website that can be installed, configured and customised according to user requirements. Further access is provided by graphical and text based applications or programmatically using web services or API written in Perl and Java. BioMart has built-in support for query optimisation and data federation and in addition can be configured to work as a DAS 1.5 Annotation server. The process of converting a data source into BioMart format is fully automated by the tools included in the package. Currently supported RDBMS platforms are MySQL, Oracle and Postgres. BioMart is completely Open Source, licensed under the LGPL, and freely available to anyone without restrictions.

This article examines the relationship between Open Access to the scholarly literature and innovation. It traces the ideas of "end to end" network principles in the Internet and the World Wide Web and applies them to the scholarly biomedical literature. And the article argues for the importance of relieving not just price barriers but permission barriers.