[The launch of Microsoft Academic Search marks] the beginning of a fierce battle for control of billions of dollars, and the future of the info-economy.
Hyperbole, you say. Major academic abstracting and indexing (A&I) services are sitting up and taking notice since Microsoft's announcement....The implications of two or more free academic search engines are considerable, and could easily destablize the traditional A&I vendors such as Dialog, OVID, EBSCO and even Web of Science.
Why are they taking notice now, you ask? First, most academics start their research - somewhere. And that somewhere is on the open Web. The open web (for its supposed limitations for scholars) is a rich, dynamic environment of intellectual capital. Increasingly, peer-reviewed content is being made open access, or at least partly viewable, for those who seek to uncover it. Browsing is how academics do their research, and whose information seeking behaviours have always included "seeing what’s just come in" on the new booktruck. Now, scholars have the Web, too, and two academic search tools to leverage for wayfinding.
Will commercial vendors be affected by the rise of search titans Microsoft and Google, Yahoo and Ask? Most likely. We've seen destablization in the for-profit publishing area due to open access; search vendors will be thrown into a very unstable and potentially precarious situation, for a time. Smaller colleges and libraries will not be as inclined to buy their tools, opting instead for ease of use and access to the free tools. The humanities indexes will fare better than the science ones, at least in the short term.
My recommendation to the vendors: 1) make parts of your search tools free; 2) offer free, brief bibliographic data; 3) build products to include open access content; and 4) bring much-needed valued-added aspects to your tools by indexing free content - as in indexing and controlled vocabs....Your survival - and the future of academic research - depends on it.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/12/2006 10:12:00 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.
