Google and DSpace launch joint project

Google, one of the most popular Internet search engines, has established a collaboration with universities using DSpace to improve access to institutional archives.

MacKenzie Smith
Director of the MIT DSpace team

DSpace is an institutional digital 'superarchive' system jointly developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries and Hewlett-Packard Laboratories (see Open Access Now, October 20 2003 for an interview with MacKenzie Smith, Director of the MIT DSpace team). Over one hundred institutions around the world are using the DSpace platform to archive the scholarly output of their academic staff, such as research papers, technical reports, and copies of theses.

The DSpace Federation was established to bring together different universities that use the DSpace software in order to discuss what sort of multi-institutional federated services might usefully be built on the DSpace platform, and to explore how interoperability among these organizations' systems could create a far more valuable resource than is possible with individual systems.

Now, 17 universities around the world that are using DSpace have got together with Google to develop a pilot project to search the universities' archives. The initiative involves universities in Australia, the USA, Canada, Italy and Hong Kong. The project is being developed with the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), a non-profit computer library service based in Ohio, USA. The search is facilitated by the fact that these universities have tagged all the material in their superarchives with 'metadata tags', hidden codes that contain catalog information and summaries. DSpace Director MacKenzie Smith expects that the search feature may be available on the Google 'advanced search' page within the next few months.

"A lot of times the richest scholarly literature is buried" in search-engine results, Smith told The Chronicle of Higher Education. "As more and more content is on the Web, it's harder and harder to find the high-quality stuff that you need."

Many institutions have encountered difficulties in persuading their academic staff to deposit scholarly material in institutional archives. Several of the institutes involved in the Google project have very modest DSpace collections and some of this material is currently restricted to the relevant university's users. But Smith stresses that DSpace usage is increasing and that the system can be easily and rapidly scaled up.

Despite these caveats, the DSpace and Google joint project represents an important initiative to explore how institutional archives can be linked and searched. In the future, Google might consider partnering other archive systems, such as Eprints, and DSpace expects to work with other search engines.

The Google-DSpace agreement comes amid much discussion about search engines for scholarly material. Elsevier, one of the largest scientific publishers, recently announced that it will soon launch Scopus, its own search engine covering abstracts from 14,000 scientific journals. Scopus aims to compete with existing databases such as Web of Science, run by Thomson ISI of Philadelphia. Web of Science covers fewer journals, but it has an archive of papers going back 60 years and also provides citation statistics.

Any improved system for searching scholarly material in published journals or university archives can only be good news for researchers who want to find what they are looking for as quickly and efficiently as possible.

www.dspace.org
www.google.com

Grants program supports Open Access publishing in developing countries

The Open Society Institute (OSI) has made additional funds available to help scientists based in developing and transition countries to submit articles to Open Access peerreviewed research journals.

In March, OSI announced that it will cover the publication charges for scientists affiliated with OSI-funded member institutions when they publish articles in journals published by the Public Library of Science (PLoS). The OSI-PLoS agreement follows a similar project between OSI and BioMed Central to support publication of research from member institutions in developing countries. To date authors from OSI-qualifying countries have already published 180 articles with BioMed Central.

"Scientists in poorer countries have been virtually excluded from the journal publishing world," said Darius Cuplinskas, director of OSI's Information Program. "Open access journals will remove barriers and make these scientists full members of the international scientific community."

The OSI-PLoS Institutional Membership grants are specifically for researchers in developing and transition countries; PLoS already waives its publication charge for authors from the least developed countries. PLoS has created a 'firewall' to shield information about requests for fee waivers from editors and reviewers, thereby ensuring that the ability to pay publication charges does not influence the review process.

"The debate about open access has shifted recently," said Helen Doyle, director of development and strategic alliances at PLoS. "Doubts about its value have been replaced with doubts about its viability. This commitment from OSI answers the question of how scientists in developing countries will be able to publish in our journals on a large scale."

OSI's Information Program has always supported Open Access by advocating a two-pronged approach involving self-archiving and Open Access journals.

www.plos.org
www.soros.org/openaccess