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

[Les A Carr]

I'm finding these sentiments puzzling. There are many repository indexing services, such as OAIster, BASE, OpenAIRE and any number of indexing services from the DRIVER stable. (There's also Bing and Microsoft Academic Search.) None of these get much use because Google is so dominant, but there ARE a number to choose from. As Peter says, it's not that difficult.

There's all sorts of searching innovations that I'd like to see beyond Google, and Microsoft are trying hard in this space. I'd like to see even more community efforts offering greater utility than "spot the word" but I guess that these will emerge with the network effect of more OA from more authors.

Sent from my iPhone

On 13 Jul 2012, at 17:14, "Peter Murray-Rust" <pm286 at cam.ac.uk<mailto:pm286 at cam.ac.uk>> wrote:



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