Google’s Offer to Digitize Journal Back Runs for OA
Google is offering to digitize and provide OA to the back runs of scholarly journals. Excerpt from Google’s Overview and FAQ:
While many publishers and organizations are working on bringing journal collections online, a substantial fraction of scholarly journals are currently offline and may remain offline for the foreseeable future. Google is offering publishers an archival journal digitization program to bring these archival collections online and to make them more accessible.
Highlights:
* Publishers maintain copyright and ownership of their content. Publishers select the journal volumes to be digitized.
* This service is free and will make articles from the selected issues fully [and freely] accessible to all users.
* Hosted pages that display journal articles will include publisher co-branding/logo and a link back to the publisher’s website.
* This program is non-exclusive. There is no restriction on redigitization of this material or on working with other partners.
Additional Details:
* The digitized journal articles will be included in Google search indices including Google Web Search and Google Scholar.
* Publishers can create a table of contents on their website and link to their digitized articles in Google, allowing users to browse their archives from their website….
* Publishers have the option to include Google’s ads on the hosted pages that display the journal articles. This is setup as a revenue share between the publisher and Google.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. Does this mean all my journals have to be offered openly accessible?
A. No, you can choose the journal volumes to be included. The goal of this program is to bring archival journal collections online.
Q. Can you provide us with the digital files?
A: We are unable to provide the digital files unless we terminate the service or the agreement. We would like to point out that this is a non-exclusive program….
Q: Will Google provide us with reporting tools so I know how many users are reading my digitized content?
A: Yes, we will provide tools for publishers to view the usage of their content.
Q: What will users see when they find my digitized articles?
A: Users will see the full digitized article and will have an option to download PDFs for reading or printing. The pages that display the article will also include the publisher’s
logo and url….
Open Access News, 12/17/06 - http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
