2 ms·
This sounds like a great idea, but won't it immediately run into a problem with journal publishers? Why would journals allow papers they publish to be indexed
by rwl 15y ago
This sounds like a great idea, but won't it immediately run into a problem with journal publishers? Why would journals allow papers they publish to be indexed and included in a giant "open" database, from which they derive no revenue?
In other words: does a free and open index of scientific knowledge also require free and open scientific publications? (If not, why not?)
- _delirium 15y agoWeb of Science is actually just the index; it doesn't provide access to the full papers. I don't think the list of titles plus factual information about which papers cited which other ones is copyrightable, though they might have a problem if they want to include abstracts. On the other hand, Citeseer already automatically builds such a database, which includes abstracts, and they haven't been sued. In my field (CS), I don't think anyone uses Web of Science anymore anyway. We've mostly moved to using a mixture of Citeseer and Google Scholar, plus some publisher-specific indexes like the ACM Portal and IEEE Explorer. For paper-relationship discovery, Cite-U-Like and Mendeley also get some use.
- rflrob 15y agoIt may depend on the journal. I've definitely downloaded PDFs from Web of Knowledge, with the Cell journals seeming to use it instead of having their own archival facilities facing the web.