The scientific papers and their contents are in high demand. For example, National Institute of Health’s PubMed Central provides free access to biomedical literature and has one million unique visitors daily. 40% of its visitors are citizens rather than universities or companies. However, not all the academic paper contents are accessible due to a paywall that prevents free distribution, locking up scientific knowledge. FactPub (http://factpub.org) aims to provide the public a method to access information beyond paper paywalls while respecting copyright law. FactPub is based on the concept of 'idea-expression dichotomy' which is that facts cannot be copyrighted, and that their distribution is not bound by copyright licenses. Factify processes paragraphs to meaningful sentence-level facts using Stanford Core NLP library. Factify is run on the client side as a browser extension (Firefox/Chrome) to parse academic PDF papers. After Factify extracts facts from a paper, it uploads ‘facts’ to factpub.org, generating the content page in Wiki text format. Large-scale adoption of this fact-publishing framework will empower accessibility to health and other scientific research. DISCLAIMER: The presenter is not a lawyer. Please consult qualified legal counsel if an opinion is required on legal matters.

1. FactPub: the open-access web
platform for academic paper contents
Genome Institute of Singapore
2016Sep22
Sun Sagong, Xiaocheng Huang, Lucas Tan and Pauline Ng
DISCLAIMER: Nothing in this paper shall be construed as legal advice. The authors are not lawyers. Readers should
consult qualified legal counsel if they require an opinion on legal matters.

2. Background
- 72% of internet users look online for health information
- 26% of people seeking health information online have hit a pay wall*
*Pew Internet & American Life Project: Health Online 2013

3. Existing Solutions
- Advantages
- Full text
- Disadvantages
- Piracy!
- Unknown how long content will be available
- Temporary URLs
- Popularity attracts lawsuits
- In 2013, Academia.edu had to take down Elsevier’s request, even though they were uploaded by the
authors.

4. Our Solution
• FactPub: http://factpub.org
• Points
- Apermanent repository to provide scientific facts to the public
- A donor distributes facts, not academic papers
- Public can search for facts and find them

5. Step 1: Choose Academic PDF
- Scientific paper is chosen by users with either Desktop Application or Browser Extension
https://github.com/sunsagong/factify_chrome_extension_nativeapp
Desktop Application Browser Extension
User browses PDFUser drags & drops PDF
or
https://github.com/happybelly/factify_GUI

6. Step 2: Extraction Process
- Factify.jar : Fact Extraction Module (Java) - Runs on fact donor’s local machine
https://github.com/happybelly/factify
Scientific
Paper
Facts
1. PDF to structured texts
2. Rule-based fact extraction algorithm is performed

7. Step 2: Extraction Process

8. Step 2: Extraction Process

9. Step 3: Facts Sent & Publicized
- Facts file is sent to the server and user can see the generated page URL
- Server side processing produces the wiki page from the facts file
Facts
or

10. An Example Search box
Inferred title / DOI provide paper details
Full Abstract is provided

11. An Example
Acronyms & Tables
Content structure is
preserved
Each sentence converted to a fact

12. References
1. Pew Internet & American Life Project: Health Online 2013
2. Pauline, Ng - Breaking Down Paywalls for Online Health - Data By The Bay
2016 / ODSC East 2016
3. Klampfl, S et al : Unsupervised Document structure analysis of digital
scientific articles. : Digital Libraries 14(3-4): 83-99(2014)
4. Huang, Xiaocheng and Pauline, Ng: Enabling Public Access to Non-Open
Access Biomedical Literature via Idea-Expression Dichotomy and Fact
Extraction: AAAI Workshop on Scholarly Big Data, 2016