Press releases

19 November 2004

Google Scholar "good news for Open Access"

BioMed Central, the Open Access publisher and providers of the Open Repository service, warmly welcomes Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/), launched this week in beta version by Google Inc. Google Scholar will offer a major resource for scientists and academic researchers and maximises the opportunities offered by Open Access journals and open repositories.

Google Scholar helps users find scholarly literature such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts, and technical reports. The free search service will search open repositories, including those built by Open Repository, as well as websites of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities. This will ensure that articles deposited in these repositories are really accessible, and are brought to the attention of the researcher in the same way as the version of the article available on a publisher's website.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the US and the Wellcome Trust in the UK are currently considering asking all researchers who receive grants from them to deposit their articles in an open access repository, as a condition of the grant.

"You should be able to see the full text of articles from open access journals and preprint repositories," according to the Google Scholar website. For Open Access journals, like those published by BioMed Central, the full text is freely available online. Google Scholar will search the full text of these articles, and will also provide a link to the full text in the search results.

BioMed Central Publisher Jan Velterop said, "We, along with others in the scientific community, have been talking to Google about offering a service like this for some time. We are very pleased that they have taken this step. This will really increase the access to and visibility of research deposited in repositories - it's a huge boost to the drive to provide Open Access to research."

Google Scholar searches a specific subset of Google's index and covers a wide swath of fields, from medicine and physics to economics and computer science. The service draws upon newly developed algorithms to list the academic research that appears to be most relevant to a search request, filtering out all non-scientific search results.

# # #

Press Office Contacts:

Grace Baynes for BioMed Central
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7631 9988
E-mail: press@biomedcentral.com

More information about Google Scholar is available in its About pages: http://scholar.google.com/scholar/about.html

# # #

Open Repository (http://www.openrepository.com/) is a service from BioMed Central for institutions and organizations to build and maintain repositories on their behalf.

BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com) is an independent online publishing house committed to providing immediate access without charge to the peer-reviewed biological and medical research it publishes. This commitment is based on the view that open access to research is essential to the rapid and efficient communication of science. In addition to open-access original research, BioMed Central also publishes reviews and other subscription-based content.