Google Scholar "good news for Open Access"

[Liblicense-L Listowner <liblicen@pantheon.yale.edu>]

From: Grace Baynes 
Sent: 19 November 2004 12:27
To: 'liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu'
Subject: Press release: Google Scholar "good news for Open Access"

Apologies for cross-posting. Of possible interest to the list.

Press Release: 19 November 2004

Google Scholar "good news for Open Access"

BioMed Central, the Open Access publisher and providers of the Open
Repository service, warmly welcomes Google Scholar
(http://scholar.google.com/), launched in beta version by Google Inc. Google
Scholar will offer a major resource for scientists and academic researchers
and maximises the opportunities offered by Open Access journals and open
repositories.

Google Scholar helps users find scholarly literature such as peer-reviewed
papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts, and technical reports. The
free search service will search open repositories, including those built
by Open Repository, as well as websites of academic publishers,
professional societies, preprint repositories and universities. This will
ensure that articles deposited in these repositories are really
accessible, and are brought to the attention of the researcher in the same
way as the version of the article available on a publisher's website.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US and the Wellcome Trust
in the UK are currently considering asking all researchers who receive
grants from them to deposit their articles in an open access repository,
as a condition of the grant.

"You should be able to see the full text of articles from open access
journals and preprint repositories" according to the Google Scholar
website. For Open Access journals, like those published by BioMed Central,
the full text is freely available online. Google Scholar will search the
full text of these articles, and will also provide a link to the full text
in the search results.

BioMed Central Publisher Jan Velterop said "We, along with others in the
scientific community, have been talking to Google about offering a service
like this for some time. We are very pleased that they have taken this
step. This will really increase the access to and visibility of research
deposited in repositories - it's a huge boost to the drive to provide Open
Access to research."

Google Scholar searches a specific subset of Google's index and covers a
wide swath of fields, from medicine and physics to economics and computer
science. The service draws upon newly developed algorithms to list the
academic research that appears to be most relevant to a search request,
filtering out all non-scientific search results.


# # #

Press Office Contacts:

Grace Baynes for BioMed Central
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7631 9988
E-mail: press@biomedcentral.com

More information about Google Scholar is available in its About pages:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar/about.html

Open Repository (http://www.openrepository.com/) is a service from BioMed
Central for institutions and organizations to build and maintain
repositories on their behalf.

BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com) is an independent online
publishing house committed to providing immediate access without charge to
the peer-reviewed biological and medical research it publishes. This
commitment is based on the view that open access to research is essential to
the rapid and efficient communication of science. In addition to open-access
original research, BioMed Central also publishes reviews and other
subscription-based content.

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