Google's Scholarly Search Service and Institutional OA Self-Archiving

[Stevan Harnad]

On Thu, 18 Nov 2004, Leslie Carr wrote:

> Google's new... http:///scholar.google.com [delivers]... a search
> service... [that is selective for] scholarly and scientific resources...
> from all web sites... across the complete spectrum of scholarly enquiry...
> [plus] a basic level of citation analysis..

    An extremely valuable and welcome new service (and about time!):

    "Re: proposed collaboration: google + open citation linking" (2001)
    http://www.openarchives.org/pipermail/oai-general/2001-June/000035.html

> [But] Google is not offering increased Open Access, just improved resource
> discovery of current ad-hoc OA. To advance we still need to offer carrot
> and stick, policies and mandates...
>
> [The] Google scholarly search engine is a welcome addition to
> the arsenal of services that researchers use to mine the literature -
> but it is still OA Institutional Repositories that provide the best
> chance of getting readable copies of those papers into Google!

In other words, please don't imagine that Google will now provide OA
full-texts for you! Google is now selectively gathering and making them
visible, and even providing some citation impact counts -- but it can
only do that with those full-texts that have been made OA by putting
them on the Web!

Our estimates across disciplines indicate that currently at most only 20%
of the journal articles being published today are being made OA:

    http://citebase.eprints.org/isi_study/
    http://www.crsc.uqam.ca/lab/chawki/ch.htm
    http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

This wonderful new service from google should (as Les Carr indicates) be taken
as yet another strong incentive for authors' institutions and research funders
to mandate and reward OA -- and authors to do -- self-archiving of the
remaining 80%!

    "What Provosts Need to Mandate" (2003)
    "http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3420.html"

    "University policy mandating self-archiving of research output" (2004)
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3438.html

    "Mandating OA around the corner?"
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3829.html

    "Guide for the Perplexed: Re: UK Select Committee Inquiry"
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4131.html

    "Critique of PSP/AAP Critique of NIH Proposal"
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4146.html

    "Critique of STM Critique of NIH Proposal"
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4174.html

Stevan Harnad

Relevant Prior Amsci Forum Topic Threads:

    "Citation-Linking" (1999)
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0284.html

    "Economic effects of link-based search engines on e-journals" (2000)
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0894.html

    "A Search Engine for Searching Across Distributed Eprint Archives"
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0927.html

    "Testing the citation-ranking search engine: Citebase" (2002)
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2121.html

    "Scientometric OAI Search Engines"
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2237.html

    "Need for systematic scientometric analyses of open-access data"
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2521.html

    "How to compare research impact of toll- vs. open-access research" (2003)
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2858.html

    "Measuring cumulating research impact loss across fields and time"
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3212.html

    "Do Open-Access Articles Have a Greater Research Impact?"
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3975.html

    "Early Download Impact Predicts Later Citation Impact"
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3950.html

    "Self-Archiving Incentives: Download Impact Counts"
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/4085.html