Francis C. Assisi, Anurag Acharya Helped Google's Scholarly Leap, IndoLink, January 3, 2005. A profile of Anurag Acharya, the Google engineer behind Google Scholar. Excerpt: 'To rank the results, Google Scholar applies the same criteria that scientists use when deciding which papers to read, says Acharya, including the importance of the journal and how often the work has been cited. Although the tool obtains abstracts for most articles, one will need a subscription to download the full text of some publications. Acharya says upcoming features will include limiting searches by date. According to Acharya, a former faculty member at UCSB, the project was also an effort to address a problem he confronted while enrolled in his B.Tech at IIT Kharagpur. As a student he found materials in his college library, at times, to be significantly out of date. Acharya, who earned his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon in 1997, expects Google Scholar will make the world's scientific literature universally accessible....What is the secret of Google’s spectacular success over the past six years? Says Krishna Bharat [the engineeer behind Google News]: "At Google we have a broad charter - to organize the world´s information and make it universally accessible and useful. The mission puts people before profits, so our focus is locked on to a stable target - meeting people's expectations, rather than the whims of the marketplace."'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/03/2005 01:21:00 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.
