The National Academies Press has published a compendium of academic thinking about sharing academic data, "The Future of Scientific Knowledge Discovery in Open Networked Environments: Summary of a Workshop." It is available to download free as a PDF.

Freebase is an open Creative Commons licensed graph database. It is not a database of graphs, but rather, 'graph' refers to the structure of the database. Instead of using tables and keys as in traditional databases, Freebase defines its data structure as a set of nodes and links between nodes.

Computers can rapidly scan through thousands of research papers to make useful connections, but work is being slowed by publishers' unease, according to Richard Van Noorden's article 'Trouble at the text mine' in Nature 483, 134-135 (08 March 2012) doi:10.1038/483134a.