Daniel Terdiman, A Tool for Scholars Who Like to Dig Deep, New York Times, November 25, 2004. Excerpt: '"For scholars and researchers of every stripe, [Google Scholar] will be enormously helpful to be able to sit at their kitchen tables with a regular Internet connection and get access to papers we formerly found only by trudging to a university library," said Emily Shurr, a Duke University instructor in leadership training. "It could be a huge timesaver, and it could force us researchers and scholars to refine our craft." One side effect of Google Scholar is that academics may realize they have been missing out on a lot of potential resources. "It's going to be interesting, because we're trying to explain to our faculty that the price of scholarly journals is just skyrocketing," said Daniel Greenstein, the librarian for the California Digital Library (www.cdlib.org) of the University of California. "As they go to Google Scholar, they're going to find a bunch of stuff we don't have access to, and I think that could end up creating a degree of frustration that could reflect badly on the publishers." To Anurag Acharya, the engineer who designed Google Scholar, that is a Pandora's box well worth opening. "The way I look at it, our goal is to allow researchers to at least find that the content exists," Mr. Acharya said. "Not knowing about a paper that is relevant to your work is much worse than actually knowing it exists but not being able to get to it immediately."...And Laura Driussi, the assistant marketing director at the University of California Press, said Google Scholar may hint at the promise of a potential gold mine: the linking of Google Scholar to Google Print (print.google.com), a service that makes it possible to search the entire texts of tens of thousands of books. "If you searched for one of our books on Google Scholar, you'll only see the citation, because the books aren't online," she said. "But we do have 1,500 books on Google Print, and they could make that information available to Google Scholar." '
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/25/2004 04:39:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
