Stuart Lewis’ Blog

There is some more good news for repositories that surfaced this weekend (via Peter Suber’s blog and Klaus Graf) about how Google Scholar now highlights results that have open access versions of papers by the addition of a green flag / arrow / triangle.

Google continues its behaviour of showing the publishers version of the paper as the first result, but where it does do this, it also lists the open version next to the title:

This should make Google Scholar much more useful, as one of the common arguments held against it in the OA world is that it puts the publishers version first, even if it isn’t open but there is an open version available. Thanks Google!

As a closing remark, I’ll comment on Peter Suber’s closing remark in his blog post:

Note the first item on the return list for this search:

• “klaus graf”

The green triangle points to a version of an article with a Google address.  Is Google also entering the OA archiving business?

For all we know Google may be entering the OA archiving business, but in this case it is just a PDF hosted on a http://pages.google.com/ ’Google Page Creator’ site (now ‘Google Sites’) which is a simple hosting facility provided by Google to anyone.

Some good news for open access repository advocates: It seems that the normal Google search engine has now started bringing the richness of Google Scholar results into the main Google search results. This extra information includes:

• The (first) author’s name
• Links to papers that have cited it
• Links to related articles
• Links to other versions

For me this is great news. When we go out selling repositories to academics, one of our arguments is “your paper will appear in Google Scholar, and other specialist search engines such as Intute Repository Search and OAIster“. However, if we are honest, how many people use these, and I’m including Google Scholar in this, as their first point of call? Not many I suspect.

So getting this extra information into Google is a big selling point as we now get the richness of Google Scholar into our default search service.

This example shows a paper written a couple of years ago by Jon Bell and myself about using OAI-PMH and METS to move items between repositories, and you can see the extra metadata from Google Scholar being shown.