Scopus announced today that it has enhanced its organization of OA content from institutional repositories. Scopus is an Elsevier product. From today's announcement:
Scopus...is the first and only database of its kind to provide a fully customizable feature to its customers that enables users to search within selected repositories or subject specific digital archives within the Scopus interface. This new feature in Scopus, Selected Sources, allows customers to choose from a list of institutional resources and special subject collections indexed by Scirus to be made individually searchable in a separate tab; in effect highlighting the best scientific information from the web to their users.
Furthermore, for the first time, librarians can request for their own institutes' repositories and digital archive to be indexed and made searchable through the Scopus interface.
Now that these Selected Sources can be selected and searched separately by universities, departments, government agencies and corporations can enhance traditional literature searching by providing easy access to non-published intellectual output such as theses, lecture notes, presentations, manuscripts and prepress papers. Additionally it provides exposure of the research carried out at institutes that offer their repositories online and it bridges the gap between traditional and new search environments....
Librarians can choose from over 19 institutional repositories indexed by Elsevier's Scirus including MIT OpenCourseWare, the University of Toronto's T-Space, the Caltech collection of open digital archives and other gray literature sources such as NASA. The Selected Sources feature is available to all subscribers and can be quickly and easily customized by contacting Scopus' E-Helpdesk. Customers can also request their repositories to be indexed by Scirus for free.
Comment. I'm glad to see that Scopus will index any institutional repository on request (the more tools indexing this content the better) and glad that it will let users pick the repositories they'd like to search (the more flexibility in searching this content the better).
However, Scopus is expensive for users. Institutions that already have OA repositories don't need Scopus to make their research output accessible and searchable. The institutional repository and free search engines (OAI-specific search engines like OAIster and mainstream search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft) already do that. But clearly institutions have nothing to lose and everything to gain by asking Scopus to include their content as well.
For users who don't have access to Scopus, it's less important to demand local access to Scopus than to join the effort to persuade more institutions to provide OA to their research output. And for institutions that don't already have OA repositories and want to make their research output more accessible, it's less important to provide access to Scopus users than to provide open access to everyone, including Scopus.
While the technology used to create the Selected Sources feature is hardly new, it's a very important breakthrough for scientific publishers to embrace the exposure of enterprise content to a more general audience. It helps to expose ideas and research under investigation in a way that is far more likely to result in powerful awareness and interactions surrounding the work of scientific professionals in highly useful contexts. The Selected Sources feature positions Elsevier as a provider of a far broader base of content than just journals that can help scientific professionals to solve key problems and that can help to position participating institutions as thought leaders in ways that will encourage collaboration. It's "low hanging fruit" from a product design perspective but as a first step it's an exciting hint of what scientific publishers can do to develop high-margin services that amplify the value of an enterprise's intellectual property significantly.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/21/2006 11:41:00 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.
