Elsevier invites Google and Google Scholar to index its journals: Peter Brantley, Science Direct-ly into Google, O'Reilly Radar, July 3, 2007. Excerpt: ScienceDirect (SD) is a compendium of scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature from Reed Elsevier [...] Ale de Vries, the SD product manager, informs me in an email: “About Google/Google Scholar: we're making good progress. As you may be aware, we did a pilot with some journals on SD first, and now we are working to get them all indexed. We're making good progress there - it's a lot of content to be crawled, but going along nicely. Both Google Scholar and main Google are gradually covering more and more of our journals. ” (Via Open Access News.)
Several other closed-access journals are already indexed by Google Scholar. For an academic user like me, it is very convenient to have unified search across all scholarly sources, open or closed, rather than having to search separately my institutional e-resource index and the open-access literature. It is plausible to assume that accesses to closed resources have been dropping as a fraction of all accesses as open resources become more available. Certainly, I am much more likely to search on Google Scholar than on SD even though Penn gives me access to it. For Reed Elsevier, Google indexing will bring more traffic into SD from users like me, which will help them justify their high subscriptions to budget-pressed academic libraries.
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