Mark Chillingworth, Google unveils beta Scholar, Information World Review, November 29, 2004. Excerpt: 'Information professionals have responded to the new service by airing concerns that Scholar confines the role of librarian to the dustbin. But Jan Velterop, BioMed Central publisher, believes they should embrace it. "It offers a future for them building repositories. With Google Scholar, repositories can disseminate information, which is essentially what a library is," he said. Google Scholar looks like being a bigger headache to A&I services like ISI Web of Knowledge and the newly-launched Scopus from Elsevier. The Dutch publisher was sanguine about its new rival. Marike Westra, Elsevier communications manager, thought it presented no challenge at all: "Scopus is designed for librarians and researchers." BioMed?s Velterop countered: "This is a threat to Scopus, it is better and it is free."...Google Scholar could be the key to institutional repository growth. "It makes them easier to find and to see how repositories can be a good resource," Velterop said. "It points to a future where repositories can be linked and validated, which is a boost to OA and the way science works." OA publishers such as BioMed Central see Google Scholar as a major ally for their cause. Velterop said: "It's a huge boost to the drive to provide open access research."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/29/2004 01:35:00 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.
