What I’m Reading: Jailbreaking the PDF

Peter Murray-Rust has written a series of blog posts on Jailbreaking the PDF. The goal of this initiative is to break open the PDF – and allowing for a whole host of new information and data to be extracted from PDFs, which have a long history of being proprietary and extremely difficult to extract information from. Only recently have we seen the change in the functionality of the PDF, and even currently generated PDFs will leave some wanting.  There are years, if not decades, of scholarly information locked in previous iterations of the PDF.

The Jailbreaking the PDF hackathon, again covered by Peter Murray-Rust, is just the first of a series to free the information locked in this format.

You can read more at Murray-Rust’s blog, A Scientist and the Web, or just read more about Jailbreaking the PDF. This is a group that is devoted to making knowledge more accessible and breaking down the barriers that currently restrict information and slow down science. If you’re interested in deconstructing the current barriers surrounding information, you can become a part of this movement – learn more at scholrev.org.