Joab Jackson, Science.gov 2.0 plumbs depths of federal data, Government Computer News, June 29, 2004. Excerpt: "The 2-year-old Science.gov portal now can reach 47 million agency pages as well as databases, drilling down into what researchers call 'the deep Web.' Science.gov 2.0, which went live last month, takes a further step toward unifying the presentation of hits found by the portal's Distributed Explorit engine. The original portal could only group the results according to the databases from which they came. Version 2.0 presents the hits in one set, ordered by their usefulness to the searcher....[S]cientific users have particular search needs that cannot be met by a commercial engine. They generally look for a set of documents, not a single page, and often they want all the material that exists about a topic. A search term such as 'pesticides' spans agency research at the Agriculture Department, NASA, the Navy and other agencies not ordinarily associated with pesticides, said Eleanor Frierson, who co-chairs the Science.gov Alliance and is deputy director of the National Agricultural Library. Furthermore, commercial search engines do not index databases, where most scientific papers are stored. So researchers until now have had to go from agency site to agency site, hunting down relevant information....The alliance continues to recruit agencies for Science.gov. The portal has pointers to an estimated 90 percent of government research, but some areas remain untouched. An agency interested in joining the alliance has to pay $7,500 per year and ensure that its own content is ready for searching."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/29/2004 10:41:00 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.
