Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Thursday, September 11, 2008

Google Scholar starts to flag gratis OA content

Klaus Graf points out (by email) that Google has started to mark some gratis OA resources with a right-pointing green triangle. 

I've run some tests of my own.  It's true.  Google doesn't come close to marking all the gratis OA resources, but at least it's marking some.  Perhaps the coverage will improve with time.  I haven't found any explanation of the new feature at the site.

Here are some sample searches:

Note the first item on the return list for this search:

The green triangle points to a version of an article with a Google address.  Is Google also entering the OA archiving business?

Update (9/15/08).  Also see Stuart Lewis' comments:

...This should make Google Scholar much more useful, as one of the common arguments held against it in the OA world is that it puts the publishers version first, even if it isn’t open but there is an open version available. Thanks Google!

As a closing remark, I’ll comment on Peter Suber’s closing remark in his blog post:

Note the first item on the return list for this search:

The green triangle points to a version of an article with a Google address.  Is Google also entering the OA archiving business?

For all we know Google may be entering the OA archiving business, but in this case it is just a PDF hosted on a http://pages.google.com/ ’Google Page Creator’ site (now ‘Google Sites’) which is a simple hosting facility provided by Google to anyone.

Update (11/21/08).  Also see John Willinsky's comments.  Excerpt:

...Google Scholar’s identification of open access versions alleviates the frustration of seeing a system so adept at harvesting the location of every mention and citation of a paper, and then not making readily apparent this one extremely valuable piece of information --can I read the work, if I don’t happen to belong to a library with a subscription or cannot bring myself to spend $31.50 to read it?

Having said all of that, I have to add that Anurag Acharya, chief Google engineer on Google Scholar, disagrees. He explained to me that the green marker indicates materials that are “available to a specific user and NOT what is open access (i.e., it is customized for each user and is not a global marker).” So, if I have library privileges to an article, it should get a green marker. If I am working in a low-income country, journals that have policies offering access in such circumstances should have green markers. And if a journal or a repository offers open access to its content, it, too, should have a green marker. “For example,” he added, “if you were testing from, say, India or Ghana or Kenya, and were searching for articles from PNAS, you would see a different set of links marked. Also, it as yet depends on the number of publishers that make accessibility information available to us. We expect this number to grow.”

You be the judge. It sounds like a shout out to open access to me....

Google Scholar’s latest step in organizing all the world’s information can make all the difference for a whole new set of users, the difference, that is, between grasping at a glance what knowledge can be readily pursued and having to wonder if one’s feeling lucky.