[GOAL] Re: Searching for OA vs. Providing OA

[Sally Morris]

It's my understanding that Google (and Google Scholar) find published
articles because the publishers enable crawling - whether the content is
freely available or not (if I'm oversimplifying, someone will no doubt set
me right).  Are repository managers unintentionally blocking this?
 
Sally
 
Sally Morris
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK  BN13 3UU
Tel:  +44 (0)1903 871286
Email:  sally at morris-assocs.demon.co.uk
 

  _____  

From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf
Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: 04 January 2013 23:19
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Searching for OA vs. Providing OA


On Fri, Jan 4, 2013 at 5:03 PM, Gerritsma, Wouter <Wouter.Gerritsma at wur.nl>
wrote:

 

 Google Scholar is a very good fulltext scholarly search engine, no doubt
about it. But it doesn't find all the ftxt available on the web, albeit it
does a good job.

Take e.g. one of my articles
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=17014920805021872143
<http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=17014920805021872143&hl=en&as_sdt
=0,5> &hl=en&as_sdt=0,5 GS found two PDF version's but not the one on our
universities repository. That is still not fully indexed. Although it gets
close http://library.wur.nl/WebQuery/wurpubs/lang/380005 it found our
metadata reocrd, but not the ftxt.

I guess this is still the case with many repositories. Earlier this year it
was even reported in the literature:

 

Arlitsch, K. & P.S. O'Brien (2012). Invisible institutional repositories:
addressing the low indexing ratios of IRs in Google. Library Hi Tech, 30(1):
60-81 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/07378831211213210

 

So Google Scholar is still not the cure all for all OA available in the
world. Interestingly our repository is better indexed in the standard Google
search engine rather than the Scholar version.

 

So my point is, doing a search on GS, and finding a lot of hits still
doesn't guarantee to find all the ftxt of those papers. 


Google Scholar does not find *all* the full-text papers freely accessible
online, but it finds most of them -- and incomparably more of them than any
other search engine. 

Yes, Google Scholar coverage of institutional repositories can and will
improve. But it won't make much difference as long as most institutional
repositories are un-mandated, and hence near empty.

To repeat, the problem is that Green OA self-archiving needs to be mandated
-- by institutions and funders -- worldwide. Till it is, we are mostly
spinning wheels.

And if and when OA is closer to 90% than to 10%, not only will Google
Scholar developers dramatically upgrade Google Scholar's power, but many
other OA-specific search engines will do so too.

Till then, however, it's hardly worth their while.

Stevan Harnad

PS: A side-bet (that I've made before): Once OA full-text is reliably near
100%, intelligent text-mining software-based tagging will outperform any
prefabricated, author-generated, librarian-generated or crowd-source based
tagging scheme for search and discovery. (But there's no motivation at all
to develop such future wonders on the impoverished corpus we have now...)
 

From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf
Of Stevan Harnad
Sent: donderdag 3 januari 2013 2:09
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Cc: SPARC Open Access Forum; scholcomm at ala.org T.F.; LibLicense-L Discussion
Forum
Subject: [GOAL] Re: New Year's challenge for repository developers and
managers: awesome cross-search

 

CHEER-LEADING, CHALLENGES AND REALITY

 

What is missing and needed is not "awesome repositories cross-search tools."


 

What is missing and needed is OA repository deposits, and OA deposit
mandates. 

 

The repositories are mostly empty. 

 

And Google Scholar finds what OA content there is -- wherever it is on the
web -- incomparably better than "awesome repositories cross-search tools."

 

Here is just a sample vanity search on a relatively uncommon name (try your
own):

 

Awesome repositories cross-search tool: Harnad 140
<http://network.bepress.com/explore/?q=Harnad> hits

Google Scholar: Harnad 15,900 hits
<http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=Harnad&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5>
(author:Harnad: 1,010
<http://scholar.google.ca/scholar?q=author%3AHarnad&btnG=&hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5
>  hits)

 

 

 


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