Product Overview of Lens.org
Introduction
Lens.org, a flagship project of the social enterprise Cambia, is a comprehensive and open platform designed to aggregate, manage, and analyze vast amounts of scholarly works, patents, and biological sequences. This platform aims to facilitate discovery, analysis, decision-making, and collaboration by linking diverse open knowledge sets and providing user-friendly tools.
Core Functions
The Lens.org platform is built around four primary functions:
- Discover: Users can search and discover millions of scholarly records, patent documents, and biological sequences extracted from patents.
- Analyze: Advanced analytics tools enable users to analyze these datasets, including citation indexing, structured search capabilities, and filtering options.
- Manage: The platform offers tools to manage and track collections of works or patents, allowing users to monitor and analyze these collections dynamically.
- Share: Users can share their findings and collaborate with others, leveraging the platform’s open and equitable access model.
Key Features
Scholarly Works
- The Lens hosts over 200 million scholarly records compiled from sources such as Microsoft Academic, PubMed, and Crossref, enhanced with UnPaywall open access information.
- Users can search, facet, or filter these records by granular metadata and view links to the patent dataset. The platform provides the full scholarly citation graph as an open public resource.
Patents
- The platform includes over 155 million global patent records, offering advanced search capabilities such as boolean functions, structured search, biological search, classification search, and filtering options.
- Tools like PatCite and PatSeq enable users to analyze patent literature and biological sequences disclosed in patents.
Integration and Linkages
- The Lens integrates data from various sources, creating reversible links between patent search results and cited scholarly works, and vice versa. This integration facilitates a holistic view of the knowledge landscape.
APIs and Bulk Data Access
- The platform provides versioned APIs for programmatic access to scholarly works and patent records. Users can also perform bulk data downloads of genetic sequences, scholarly works, and patents.
User Profiles and ORCID Integration
- Lens Profiles allow users to create composite author/inventor profiles based on ORCID records, enhancing these profiles with aggregated data from various sources. Users can claim and sync their works with their ORCID records.
Institutional Tools and Metrics
- The Lens offers specialized institutional tools and metrics, licensed to help defray costs, which support institutional effectiveness in problem-solving. These tools include collection management, saved history, and recurring queries.
Accessibility and Usage
- Lens.org is free and open to anyone in the world, with no requirement for individual account registration for basic access. Users can anonymously access and export data. For additional features, cost-free personal accounts are available for legitimate scholars and academic researchers, while business and government sectors can obtain accounts through institutional licenses or personal commercial accounts.
Mission and Vision
The Lens.org platform is designed to enable better decision-making informed by evidence and inspired by imagination. It aims to bridge domains of expertise and culture, fostering a more inclusive and collaborative global problem-solving capability.
In summary, Lens.org is a powerful tool for researchers, innovators, and policymakers, providing a unified platform to search, analyze, manage, and share scholarly works, patents, and biological sequences, all while promoting open innovation and equitable access to knowledge.