[GOAL] Re: Google's role in sustaining the public good to research parallel to developments in open access?

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 4:51 PM, Omega Alpha Open Access <
oa.openaccess at gmail.com> wrote:

> Les,
>
> Greetings. I wasn't questioning the public good Google has contributed *to
> date*, and I know they aren't the only game in town. However, they are the
> dominant player. To the degree that indexing is vital for open access
> research discoverability on the web, don't you think that it is a potential
> problem for a commercial entity to serve such a crucial role with nothing
> more than "market forces" and a promise to be a good corporate citizen to
> sustain the effort indefinitely? Google Scholar is not yet serving-up ads,
> but there is really nothing to stop them.
>

I agree with these sentiments - I think it is irresponsible for academia
not to index its own scholarship. They could and they don't.

There are several domain-specific repositories (PMC, RePEC, DBLP, Citeseer,
etc.) which systematically index large chunks of the scholarly literature
and which are Open.

It is also relatively easy to crawl the open electronic scholarship and
index it. We have done this for crystal structures (except those hidden
bethind paywalls) and have ca 200,000. We have a system PubCrawler (funded
in part by JISC) that creates systematic inxdexes of metadata.

It is particularly unfortunate that university repositories are not
systematically indexed (e.g. for theses). But many universities prefer to
give their thesis management to commercial companies and buy back the
metadata.

P.

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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