...And that was his main advice to the scientists in the room: take their scientific studies, market them better and make them readily accessible to the world. That way, the world might have a better chance at solving problems like energy consumption, poverty and global climate change....
"Science has a real marketing problem. If all the growth in world is due to science and technology and no one pays attention to you, then you have a serious marketing problem."
To that end,...[he] said that scientists should get in the habit of investing part of their scientific grant money to marketing budgets, in order to get the word out to the media about their research....
Finally, he called on the scientists to make more of their research available digitally. Even though Google Scholar tries to open access to scientific work, it still falls short.
"Most of the works you guys have done are not represented in those searches. We have to unlock the wealth of scientific knowledge and get it to everyone. I don't care what we do, but we need to do something," he said....
PS: Google supports OA by indexing the contents of OA repositories and journals and, in a different way, by digitizing public-domain books for free online reading (even if not full OA). I have a dozen serious ideas if it wants to do more. I've raised some of these ideas with the Google Corporation and the Google Foundation in the past and would be delighted to take them further.
Update. See Matt Cockerill's post on the BMC blog, listing three things that "Google could do to improve the communication of scientific research":
Highlight universally accessible articles on Google Scholar....
Generate alternative citation metrics for the scientific literature....
Build search tools that take advantage of the semantic web...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/18/2007 05:46:00 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.
