Calling International Rescue: Knowledge lost in literature and data landslide!

We live in interesting times. Portents of impending catastrophe pervade the literature, calling us to action in the face of unmanageable volumes of scientific data. But it isn't so much data generation per se, but the systematic burial of the knowledge embodied in those data that poses the problem: there is so much information available that we simply no longer know what we know, and finding what we want is hard – too hard. The knowledge we seek is often fragmen tary and disconnected, spread thinly across thousands of databases and millions of articles in thousands of journals. The intellectual energy required to search this array of dataarchives, and the time and money this wastes, has led several researchers to challenge the methods by which we traditionally commit newly acquired facts and knowledge to the scientific record. This has spawned a number of initiatives aiming to uncover this buried knowledge and to transform scholarly publishing paradigms. This article, which has been adapted from our review published in the Biochemical Journal [volume 424 (part 3), pages 317–333], provides an overview of these projects. It culminates with a description of the Semantic Biochemical Journal experiment, an exciting and innovative collaboration with Portland Press Ltd to create Utopia Documents, a new PDFdocumentreader designed to rescue data from the dormant pages of published docu ments. The article you are about to read is, in part, intended as a taster; to get the full, interactive Utopia experience, we encourage you to investigate the full review in volume 424 (part 3) of the Biochemical Journal (www. BiochemJ.org) and the other articles in that issue.