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

[Omega Alpha Open Access]

Les/Peter,

The problem I see with the "many" is the problem of FRAGMENTATION of search and discovery. If I put my academic librarian hat on for a moment and observe the way our students (and frankly, faculty too) tend to seek for needed/relevant information, they want one-stop convenience. They don't want to have to go to numerous sites to search for stuff. That is why Google is such a compelling experience. We have recently implemented EBSCO Discovery Service on our campus as a way to bring that convenience of Google-like search and discovery to vetted library resources. But at present, open access resources are only a small portion of this (though I believe EDS does search OAIster, DOAJ [though mainly at the journal level only], BioMed, etc.).

OK, we might applaud Microsoft for trying to bring competition into the market by providing a similar experience to academic search. But am I REALLY going to duplicate my search efforts between 2 or more search engines? This brings me back to the original point: Google is great. But can/ought we continue to rely so heavily on Google (or Bing/Academic Search, etc.) to assure continued indexing to open access literature?

Second, I noticed you referred to REPOSITORY indexing services. Here I think we may encounter a disciplinary difference. In the humanities, and especially religious studies/theology, I believe the growth of open access has a much better shot via the JOURNALS (Gold) route. I don't see any problem with humanities scholars utilizing repositories for practical preservation and supplemental discoverability. But this is not going to be enough to encourage a shift to OA. Scholarly tradition in the humanities strongly values associating one's research with textual artifacts and textual communities that create a sense of historical continuity. They want their research to appear as articles in journals of reputation within their discipline, and to be preserved in the archives of those journals.

The first step (and this is the role I have assumed as an OA advocate in religious studies) is to reassure humanist scholars that open access journals can function just as effectively as well-known and well-reputed subscription-based journals have done in the past. Humanities scholars are also concerned with discoverability. Here we have been stressing that OA can do a BETTER job with discoverability because, among other things, we can easily submit their research to indexing through search engines such as Google. Here too, this brings me back to the original point: Google is great. But can/ought we continue to rely so heavily on Google (or Bing/Academic Search, etc.) to assure continued indexing to open access literature?

Good weekend to all!

Gary F. Daught
Omega Alpha | Open Access

On Jul 14, 2012, at 7:00 AM, goal-request at eprints.org wrote:

> Message: 2
> Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2012 10:29:37 +0000
> From: Les A Carr <lac at ecs.soton.ac.uk>
> Subject: [GOAL] Re: Google's role in sustaining the public good to
> 	research parallel to developments in open access?
> To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal at eprints.org>
> Cc: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal at eprints.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<EMEW3|d148925cce8122914a7e596c5be81781o6DBYf03lac|ecs.soton.ac.uk|485FF2DB-FC83-4818-B60B-CDEFCA30452C at ecs.soton.ac.uk>
> 	
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> 
> 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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