Microsoft is introducing a new search tool today that will help people find scholarly articles online. The service, which will include journal articles from prominent academic societies and publishers, puts Microsoft in direct competition with Google, which offers a similar service called Google Scholar. The new free search tool, which should work on most browsers, is called Windows Live Academic Search. For now, it includes eight million articles from only a few disciplines -- computer science, electrical engineering, and physics. "We will be expanding this over time to cover all the areas where there are scientific journals," said Danielle Tiedt, general manager of content acquisition for Microsoft. "We started in the place where there is the most highly structured metadata, which is these three hard-sciences areas."
People at Microsoft and at other technology companies, such as Google, have seen academic searches as an increasingly valuable sector. Some at Microsoft have estimated that the academic-search business could be worth $10-billion by 2010, although Ms. Tiedt said that others cite figures both higher and lower. Ms. Tiedt pointed out that academic users perform six times as many searches as other people. "Obviously, getting the power searchers is important to us," she said, adding that an academic-search tool fits into Microsoft's strategy to court the academic community generally. Despite the potential for making money off power searchers, Ms. Tiedt said that there is currently no business model for Microsoft's academic-search tool. "For us this is really a loyalty game," she said. "We're putting this product out to try to get a lot of loyalty in the [academic] community."...
The scholarly organizations that have signed up to work with Microsoft on the new search tool include societies like the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, and the Institute of Physics. Also cooperating are major publishers -- such as the Taylor & Francis Group, Blackwell Publishing, Elsevier, the Nature Publishing Group, and John Wiley & Sons -- and library organizations, including the British Library and OCLC Online Computer Library Center....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/12/2006 11:44:00 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.
