'We present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine'
sciencedirect.com
sciencedirect.com
I would venture to say that all of our institutions of higher learning receive federal and state money. Each of them, as well, has an active program in place to seek out charitable contributions from alumni and other likely victims. "Help us teach the world", they tell us, as their hand reaches out for our checkbook.
There is a tradition in science of collaboration between institutions. Even countries that have political tension between them embrace, or at least succumb to, the notion of the importance of this collaboration.
Yet here we are, being asked to buy an 11 year old paper. Indeed, there's hardly an interesting paper written by anybody in academia that is easily available. Sure, you may be able to hunt it down, or go to the authors website, or pirate a copy. Why is this necessary? Why is this information sold to the world in small, hard to search doses, rather than being made freely available? Can you imagine the disservice done to mankind by this silly practice? How many inventions have not been invented? How many discoveries have not been made? This is not a drug company that's invested billions in R&D, and so deserves the fruits of it's labor. This is work by our young PhD students, funded using tax and charity money, in fields that claim to place a high value on the free exchange of knowledge, and we're still buying 11 year old academic papers.
I want academic papers to be free and available and searchable. I've already paid for them.
It doesn't take care of these older studies, or work done without NIH funding... but its a step.
And, scholar.google.com is as good of a free, full text search tool as there is. Most journal sites give the googlebot open access to index their content, so it is a great way to find things instead of pubmed, which only searches abstracts.
That's called web spamming or spamdexing via cloaking. I find it incredibly frustrating because they point you to what you want, but then you're often stuck. Do you really want to pay $30-$50 for a paper that may or may not have what you want? And Google is complicit in this, it's not just the publishers. They know it's advertising, so they charge them for it, but the results are not presented as paid ads.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing
http://www.webreference.com/authoring/search_engines/cloakin...
In the meantime, we need the universities to start playing hardball with the journals. They get rights to the paper for one year, max, and then the university will publish the paper on the web. That compensates the journals for their service, such as it is, but still makes the material available, eventually. Any contract can be negotiated, and I think this one could be, if the universities pushed on this issue.
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
Elsevier will charge $31.50 to see the same thing.
Those guys have a year-wise page. Enjoy history!
And the same paper is here too http://backrub.c63.be/May1998/anatomy.htm
P.S: you get "foo" when you visit http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/ wondering where's the "bar"