Today [Google] plans to announce a new online product aimed at being a one-stop shop for searching federal government Web sites. The launch of Google U.S. Government Search, http://usgov.google.com, targets federal employees who often need to search across several government agencies....
The government search site joins similar engines that target the same audience. The five-year-old FirstGov.gov, a government-sponsored site powered by Microsoft Corp.'s MSN, is geared to help citizens locate federal, state and local information without sifting through individual agency sites. Other similar search engines include http://govspot.com , http://searchgov.com and http://govengine.com .
[Kevin Gough, product manager for Google U.S. Government Search] said he expects Google’s product to "complement" FirstGov without directly competing with it.
Comment. Check it out. It covers PubMed Central but is not as up to date as PMC's own search engine. I searched for an author manuscript deposited in February as part of the NIH policy, and Government-Google found it. (BTW, vanilla Google found it too.) But when I searched for the most recently deposited article, Government-Google came up dry. (Vanilla Google found the journal copy but not the PMC copy.) Note the time stamp on this blog posting; if you repeat these searches at a later time, your results likely to be better than mine.
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.
