Google closes off free, public access to scholarly literature
The official Google Blog today makes exploring the scholarly neighborhood sound like a walk in the park. They have improved the service by providing links to related documents.
What they don't tell you, however, is that the search service now only links to front-end citation pages for article archives that charge membership fees or download fees.
Many of these scholarly articles have been freely indexed on the Web in the form of .PDF files and .HTML pages. If they are still there, Google has apparently now helped to bury them deeply back in the "invisible web", that segment of the World Wide Web that surfers mostly cannot reach through search engines.
Since the interface for Google Scholar has just been redesigned, one can suppose that maybe an entirely new crawl is required to repopulate the index. However, relying on fee-based article archives is hardly the best way to bring humanity's knowledge closer to people's finger tips.
What they don't tell you, however, is that the search service now only links to front-end citation pages for article archives that charge membership fees or download fees.
Many of these scholarly articles have been freely indexed on the Web in the form of .PDF files and .HTML pages. If they are still there, Google has apparently now helped to bury them deeply back in the "invisible web", that segment of the World Wide Web that surfers mostly cannot reach through search engines.
Since the interface for Google Scholar has just been redesigned, one can suppose that maybe an entirely new crawl is required to repopulate the index. However, relying on fee-based article archives is hardly the best way to bring humanity's knowledge closer to people's finger tips.
posted by Michael Martinez | 9:47 AM
1 Comments:
It's sad.
But it's also an invitation for someone else to become the science paper search engine.
I would guess that none of the other commercial players will make any such position public. But a few anonygeeks with a few bucks ought to be able to run a small pool of crawlers-on-a-t3, it seems to me. And perhaps have a presence in (say) .fi ...
Just thinking out loud here. Is anyone listening? :)
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