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| Stanford Boosts Scholarship On the Web |
| Journals made available on Google as libraries seek to save money, space |
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William Pollard (will789)  |
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Published 2005-12-12 08:59 (KST) |
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More than a million scholarly journal articles are available free through HighWire Press, a division of Stanford University Libraries.
Michael A. Keller stated that the aim of HighWire since 1995 has been to improve access to information and "to help nonprofit and responsible scholarly publishers compete as publishing entities in the Internet age." The service allows articles to be found through search engines such as Google and Google Scholar.
HighWire also hosts free access to the abstracts and tables of contents for every online issue of the full text journals and scholarly references they host. Some of the 885 journals are only available for subscribers but many offer back issues for free after a variable time period such as six months or a year. On the final day of Online Information, a convention held recently in London for information professionals, the HighWire had 1,089,896 free articles out of a total 2,881,056 entries.
The goal is to draw attention to the content on search engines such as Google. There is a debate about the reliability of information on the Web and the status of search engine results as knowledge. Google Scholar finds results that are restricted to journal subscribers. So although one may say "peer reviewed," the content of academic journals may have a limited audience and not be part of a widely based discussion.
As reported on the Information Today blog by Nancy Gorman, the keynote speech for the main conference by David Weinberger had the theme that "everything is miscellaneous."
"We are building a hugely messy web of linked metadata, and knowledge is now constituted by what's interesting to us, not to an unknown expert or rigid Aristotelian hierarchy of information," Weinberger said. "User-generated metadata completely flips the role of an expert."
There is no need to filter information on the way into a system, but only on the way out, "and then by a random group of users whose tracking and tagging converge to form knowledge," Weinberger said.
In the official blog it was reported by David Tebbutt that, "Nervous laughter echoed around the room. But, in between the laughter, you could almost hear some deep thinking taking place. Engage with the New World or seek early retirement."
 |  | |  David Weinberger | | | ©2005 Joi Ito | The video of another recent talk by Weinberger is available on the website for the Oxford Internet Institute.
Although there was much interest in wikis, blogs and open source, other points of view were expressed. Peter Morville's keynote on Information Architecture gave more weight to the benefits of content structure and tags as well as social networks. Nancy Gorman suggested this gave a balance to the Weinberger view, though some of the approach could be similar.
"If the results aren't in the first or second page of a Google search, they are practically unfindable," Gorman said. "Findability is 'pull,' the ability to get information when and however you need it."
At a recent Prolearn workshop in Madrid, Ambjorn Naeve spoke about the semantic Web and the workings of "knowledge push" and "knowledge pull."
As explained on the SIG SEMIS website:
"The traditional educational systems are based on teacher-centric, curricular-oriented knowledge push. When used for learning, the Knowledge Manifold architecture enables the design of interactive learning environments that are based on learner-centric, interest-oriented knowledge pull, and which can be designed to support inquiry-based and customizable forms of networked learning."
My own experience includes discussion on Guardian talk and with academics at conferences in Lancaster. "Mode 1" and "Mode 2" are interesting as describing mostly abstract knowledge in tightly defined disciplines compared to multi-disciplinary projects with a practical aspect, involving companies or other non-academics as "practitioners".
My problem is that academics seem to change the meaning of these terms. So on Guardian talk I have tried out Research Assessment Friendly and "'search engine constructed'. Mode 1 is probably likely to be supported by Research Assessment. Most Web searches start from a practical situation where someone is looking for information or knowledge.
There is still some way to go before search engines meet the standards available in university libraries. Posting on the Web Search Guide blog in June, "Gwen" offered some frank opinion based on a reading of Peter's Digital Reference Shelf.
"With Google Scholar you get what you pay for - nothing. 'Jacso' puts Google Scholar up against Web of Science and Scobus and the free Citeseer and eBizSearch. Notes that -- 'Google Scholar has to be looked at with this background: Even in its disappointing incarnation it is an asset for those scholars whose university or research institute cannot afford WoS or Scopus.' Those who just need a few good papers and Web sites might as well be satisfied with the regular Google or Yahoo search engines. Those who need a comprehensive set of papers that includes the most respected (and hence most-cited) articles, books and conference papers are advised to treat the hits - and citedness scores - in Google Scholar with much reservation," Gwen said.
"HighWire Press (HWP) is another story. It has 900,000 full text scholarly articles - free. There is a search appartus to locate journals and publishers, directory and a graphical topic map for subjects, and it employs Vivisimo's technology for an 'instant index' to the search results," she added.
However, information on HighWire is likely to be included in Google Scholar. "Regular Google" was enough to find these quotes.
As reported by Jim Ashling on the Information Today blog, on one of the panel discussions, Google's John Lewis Needham pointed out three factors about Google that change everything to do with search that none of the earlier speakers mentioned: the price (free), the speed (fast) and the age of the Google user and Google developer communities (20 to 30).
At the e-publishing talks, Kate Worlock encouraged publishers not to consider Google a threat, but rather to take time to consider the opportunities that Google's efforts create, for example by adding tags to content so that Google can find it more easily and draw more users to it.
"Google is leading publishers kicking and screaming down the same path as the music industry," Worlock said.
Library resources can be expensive. Oxford University Press are in the process of publishing journal back issues dated between 1829 and 1996, the time when the Web came to the attention of most academics. The benefits for librarians will include freeing up shelf space and staff time. Readers will be able to "retrieve articles directly from their desktop without searching library shelves." The price could be a limitation however. The Humanities Archive already released and costs $38,000 for perpetual access. Other archives will be released next year and there is a discount if purchased by the end of December.
Oxford University Press is also trying out the idea of open access journals but this involves a payment by authors, usually $2,800 per article though less for subscribing institutions. Information World Review reports that take-up so far has been limited to the life sciences and medicine, with no take-up in the areas of humanities or social sciences.
Even if journals are still not widely available, it is clear that a move to digital publishing has occued. The technology requires very little cost for wider distribution.
HighWire seems open to finding some common ground, a way to maintain academic standards in journal production and make knowledge available for the public.
"The million articles in the HighWire Free Back Issues Program demonstrate that there is a third way between the extremes of prohibitively expensive publication and immediate, unmediated posting of content direct to the open Web," said John Sack, director of HighWire Press.
"New business models will likely emerge but must be seriously tested over time, not only evangelized, before we can accept as demonstrated fact that they meet the needs of research and society. We and the publishers we support are testing new models continuously; this experimentation includes open-access journals, 'open choice' decisions by individual authors, author manuscript publishing, free access to developing countries and to patients, as well as other models that address access problems and take advantage of the opportunities that the new technology allows."
Recognizing that there is a "knowledge push" as well as a "knowledge pull" could contribute to a "third way" between tight academic disciplines and an open wiki. A lot could happen online before Online Information meets again next year.
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©2005 OhmyNews
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