Martin Myhill, Review of Google Scholar, Charleston Advisor, accepted in December 2004, published in April 2005. Excerpt: 'Google Scholar has tried to grapple with [the deep or invisible web] in a number of intelligent ways. First, it draws on some of the latest scholarly, open access publishing ––especially from a number of quality resources now available on the Web such as those offered by BioMed Central. Open Access is a growing and undoubtedly significant arena as academics seek to find alternative means of publishing in an increasingly cost-driven sector. But Scholar has yet to be able to draw from much of the material available in the Open Archives Initiative (particularly in local repositories), often because of limitations in the original metadata provided by the originators or because Google has not been made aware of the content. As institutional repositories proliferate around the world, searching and linking these repositories could be a very laudable use for Google Scholar, particularly as this is an aspect most traditional academic information systems will find hard to grapple with for the time being. Second, content from a major access provider to electronic journal articles, Ingenta, is included (the default being pay-per-view access at article level if other authentication means fail, which sometimes happens erroneously, although that is not the fault of Scholar). [It will also crawl other priced content.]...Third, Google has recently added a "Scholar Preferences" option. Although offering just a small number of institutions as of the date of this review, this pilot development seeks to provide access to the electronic resources available to members of various institutions. It uses local authentication systems and OpenURL linking and is clearly added-value to the institutions involved.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/04/2005 12:59:00 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.
