> Google's new... http:///scholar.google.com [delivers]... a search
> service... [that is selective for] scholarly and scientific resources...
> from all web sites... across the complete spectrum of scholarly enquiry...
> [plus] a basic level of citation analysis..
An extremely valuable and welcome new service (and about time!):
> [But] Google is not offering increased Open Access, just improved resource
> discovery of current ad-hoc OA. To advance we still need to offer carrot
> and stick, policies and mandates...
>
> [The] Google scholarly search engine is a welcome addition to
> the arsenal of services that researchers use to mine the literature -
> but it is still OA Institutional Repositories that provide the best
> chance of getting readable copies of those papers into Google!
In other words, please don't imagine that Google will now provide OA
full-texts for you! Google is now selectively gathering and making them
visible, and even providing some citation impact counts -- but it can
only do that with those full-texts that have been made OA by putting
them on the Web!
Our estimates across disciplines indicate that currently at most only 20%
of the journal articles being published today are being made OA:
This wonderful new service from google should (as Les Carr indicates) be taken
as yet another strong incentive for authors' institutions and research funders
to mandate and reward OA -- and authors to do -- self-archiving of the
remaining 80%!