ScienceDirect (SD) is a compendium of scientific, technical, and medical (STM) literature from Reed Elsevier, one of the world's largest publishers. SD, most often made available on a subscription or licensing basis to large institutions like universities, biopharmaceuticals, and other research or health related companies, claims to contain approximately "25% of the world's science, technology and medicine full text and bibliographic information." SD is an expensive, and often contentious product in Higher Education due to high year-on-year pricing increases, but it is a highly desirable one, nonetheless.
It was therefore notable when its absence from Google Scholar, Google's search interface for scholarly-related material, was realized. Scholar has become tremendously popular for focussed searches in the scholarly literature among not only academics and students, but seekers of health information and other science-based data. Elsevier has long supported its own search interface for scholarly literature, Scopus, and it was no surprise to many that they avoided inclusion. However, they doubtless lost eyeballs as more and more of this traffic migrated to the freely available Scholar product.
Elsevier has now undertaken to have the majority of its SD journals (those for which it holds or can obtain the copyrights) crawled and indexed by Google. Both Google and Google Scholar are slowly incorporating an increasing amount of this content, and these data will be appearing in search results for Google and Google Scholar.
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.
This is notable for a wide range of reasons. One of the most prominent is that Elsevier clearly feels comfortable with having its core intellectual property crawled and analyzed by Google to augment discovery. In contrast to the various European newspaper publisher-related lawsuits, Elsevier has clearly felt that even with the basic, essential tools available today - robot exclusions, sitemaps, and business agreements - their ability to execute business strategy is unimpeded by encouraging greater content exposure.
While this type of scholarly literature is often more opaque to the public than publisher- or library-based digitization programs, it is at least as important, if not more so, in relation to the number and relevance of a wide variety of searches in the critically important fields of science, technology, and health. Google's ability to index this massive quantity of information will provide it with benefits that are significant; obviously Elsevier will profit as well.
For Google, as with its Books program, the gains to indexing the world's STM information revolve around not merely that data itself, but the linkages it can form between that data and the other information to which it has access, including geospatial information, data from books, historical/timeline data, biographical data, government documents, and so forth. Clearly the rewards from this mass of material for searchers are tremendous, almost overwhelming.
Both information seekers and publishers bear the responsibility of remembering that the Lens of Google through which we increasingly seek the world is only one lens, albeit one with further and further vision.
Sphere: Related Content
It was therefore notable when its absence from Google Scholar, Google's search interface for scholarly-related material, was realized. Scholar has become tremendously popular for focussed searches in the scholarly literature among not only academics and students, but seekers of health information and other science-based data. Elsevier has long supported its own search interface for scholarly literature, Scopus, and it was no surprise to many that they avoided inclusion. However, they doubtless lost eyeballs as more and more of this traffic migrated to the freely available Scholar product.
Elsevier has now undertaken to have the majority of its SD journals (those for which it holds or can obtain the copyrights) crawled and indexed by Google. Both Google and Google Scholar are slowly incorporating an increasing amount of this content, and these data will be appearing in search results for Google and Google Scholar.
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.
This is notable for a wide range of reasons. One of the most prominent is that Elsevier clearly feels comfortable with having its core intellectual property crawled and analyzed by Google to augment discovery. In contrast to the various European newspaper publisher-related lawsuits, Elsevier has clearly felt that even with the basic, essential tools available today - robot exclusions, sitemaps, and business agreements - their ability to execute business strategy is unimpeded by encouraging greater content exposure.
While this type of scholarly literature is often more opaque to the public than publisher- or library-based digitization programs, it is at least as important, if not more so, in relation to the number and relevance of a wide variety of searches in the critically important fields of science, technology, and health. Google's ability to index this massive quantity of information will provide it with benefits that are significant; obviously Elsevier will profit as well.
For Google, as with its Books program, the gains to indexing the world's STM information revolve around not merely that data itself, but the linkages it can form between that data and the other information to which it has access, including geospatial information, data from books, historical/timeline data, biographical data, government documents, and so forth. Clearly the rewards from this mass of material for searchers are tremendous, almost overwhelming.
Both information seekers and publishers bear the responsibility of remembering that the Lens of Google through which we increasingly seek the world is only one lens, albeit one with further and further vision.
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