COPYCENSE

“Google, the popular search-engine company, has teamed up with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and 16 other universities around the world to provide a way to search the institutions’ collections of scholarly papers, according to university officials.

“A pilot test of the project is just getting under way. If all goes as planned, the search feature could appear on Google in a few months, said MacKenzie Smith, associate director of technology for MIT’s libraries. She said the search would probably be an option on Google’s advanced-search page.”

One of the most troubling issues that universities face these days is how to manage the crushing expense of subscriptions to scholarly journals (or the databases that house past issues of those journals). This effort by Google may turn out to be one of several steps — others include MIT’s DSpace and the Public Library of Science –that make scholarly research more widely available, and at a more affordable cost.

Jeffrey R. Young. Google Teams Up With 17 Colleges to Test Searches of Scholarly Materials. The Chronicle of Higher Education. April 9, 2004.

Patrick Brown. For Cracking the Spine of the Science Cartel. Wired. April 2004. (This article was written to commemorate the Public Library of Science winning the Science category of the 2004 Rave Awards.)