Barbara Quint, Google Scholar Focuses on Research-Quality Content, Information Today, November 22, 2004. Excerpt: 'While not removing any sites from the main Google service, Google Scholar enables specific searches of scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, pre-prints, abstracts, and technical reports. Content includes a range of publishers and aggregators with whom Google already has standing arrangements, e.g., the Association for Computing Machinery, IEEE, OCLC's Open WorldCat library locator service, etc. Result displays will show different version clusters, citation analysis, and library location (currently books only). Although claiming coverage "from all broad areas of research," early evaluation seems to show a clear emphasis on science and technology, rather than the arts, humanities, or social sciences. Anurag Acharya, principal engineer for Google Scholar, stated that the goal of the service was to "make it easier to find content, open access or not."...When asked about OAIster specifically, Acharya regretted that OAIster "doesn't give us all the information we need. Its metadata is often incomplete. It's not OAIster's fault. They do a wonderful job, but the data providers do not always provide full information...[I]t remains a data source under consideration."...Google does insist that, to participate in Google Scholar, sites must provide access for non-subscribers to bibliographic citations and abstracts....Acharya admitted that [quality filtering] was "a tricky issue in general, but quality will reflect naturally in the way things are ranked. We do not decide what is scholarship and what is not scholarship, but if something is not as important, it will not get as good a ranking on the corpus. Good material will gradually bubble up."...Acharya said: "We try to identify multiple versions and cluster them when we give results. We will give the alternative sites and the number of versions."...I also asked if Google planned to provide sorting by availability (immediate open Web vs. controlled access). Not at this time, though he thought it an interesting idea.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/22/2004 01:54:00 PM.
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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
