Carol Tenopir, Google in the Academic Library, Library Journal, February 1, 2005. Excerpt: 'The material in Google Scholar is not just the peer-reviewed journals available in systems like ScienceDirect, Web of Science, or SciFinder; it also includes bibliographic information about books (scholarly or not) from the OCLC WorldCat database, book reviews, and links to publishers' web sites. Occasionally, other material sneaks through, but my sample searches largely retrieved mostly relevant, relatively scholarly materials. A search of "genome project" retrieved several thousand records. The first few screens were mostly articles in PubMed and other full-text journal sources (some available only when my IP address was recognized as coming from a subscribing library and others only as pay-per-view), a few abstracts, a book description, and some dead links. Searching for "geysers" yielded similar results but with more books and book reviews. WorldCat provided the nearest library that holds the title when I put in my zip code as prompted....On the full Google, "geyser" took me to the National Park Service sites, spring water companies, tourist companies, and more. The few truly academic things were buried. Google Scholar seems to have solved this problem....Google Scholar has real potential to provide easy, one-stop access to articles in both subscription journals and items in institutional repositories, open access journals, and e-print servers. Although the beta version does not yet include Open Archives harvested materials, the power of identifying academic materials buried in a sea of web flotsam is enticing. But easy access to multiple sources unwittingly highlights a multiple version problem. Preprints, revised versions, and final versions of articles all get retrieved.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/01/2005 09:31:00 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.
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.
