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The Google Scholar

Public Access initiative

Or helpful?

Jeroen Bosman & Bianca Kramer

Utrecht University Library Academic Services meeting 20210406

slides available at https://tinyurl.com/GSpublicaccess

A distraction?

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What does it do?

Google Scholar now* offers users two new options:

  • to see how many of the publications in their profile that mention specific funders with open access mandates can be freely accessed

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  • to upload PDFs of their publications and make them freely accessible.

* As of 20210323

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How does it work?

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How does it work?

NB only the profile owner sees the option to upload PDFs

The image with the upload option we show here is a mock up

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Scope limitations?

  • It is limited to papers with funder mentions; there is no reason not to do this for all publications in the profiles
  • It is limited to 175 funders (what %?)
  • It is limited to researchers with a public Google Scholar profile

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Some implementation issues

  • False positives
    • Articles where a funder is mentioned somewhere in the full text, but not as funder of the research reported on
    • Articles published in a year the policy was active, but based on grants received before the policy became active
    • Articles where the funder policy was for one of the authors but applied to all
  • It (confusingly) mentions funder ‘embargoes’ but does not make clear �if it reckons with those
  • It suggests that it checks funder compliance, but funders demand (much) more than just free public access; in that sense it is misleading
  • It only informs authors of possible copyright issues in the small print
  • It only points at the option to use repositories in the small print

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What are the pros?

  • It functions smoothly
  • It raises awareness of the issue of access to publications
  • It may successfully nudge people to improve access to some of their their publications
  • It could be impactful, because of the sheer number of people with a Google Scholar profile and the importance people attach to findability in Google Scholar

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What are the cons?

  • It is about public access, which differs from open access in the sense that is it not sustainably archived and not machine readable
  • When researchers upload a PDF to the Google Drive it results in papers being free to access at Google, but not anywhere else, with no option for other tools to harvest metadata, or harvest or mine full texts
  • There will likely be no open license for that PDF and no guarantee the link to that PDF will remain available.
  • It could be impactful, because of the sheer number of people with a Google Scholar profile and the importance people attach to findability in Google Scholar ;-) Seriously: it may distract from providing real and lasting OA

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How is this received by the research community?

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How is this received by funders ?

Source: https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-world-2021-3-google-scholar-s-open-access-move-sends-a-powerful-message/

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How is this positioned by Google itself?

In their blogpost:

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“... help you track and manage public access mandates for your articles”

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“You can also upload a public PDF to your own Google Drive; this makes the article publicly available from your profile and eligible for inclusion in Google Scholar”

In their FAQ:

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“The Public Access section of a Google Scholar profile contains the articles that are expected to be publicly available based on funding agency mandates.”

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In the interview met Anurag Acharya in Nature:

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“We also found 175 funders that have publicly documented their mandates”

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“We tell them to check if it’s actually available, or whether they can upload the paper to a funding agency or institutional repository. As a final fallback, we invite them to upload their paper to their Google drive.”

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What could librarians / the library community do?

  • Provide a balanced view of this service
  • Advise authors to provide sustainable open access
  • Work with funders to improve green OA, esp. when there is no gold OA
  • Let Google Scholar know that we see important downsides, esp. regarding uploading PDFs to Google Drive

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Are there alternative initiatives fostering green OA at scale?

  • Taverne and similar possibilities in other countries
  • Shareyourpaper.org (OAButton)
  • Dissem.in
  • Institutional repositories
  • Subject repositories (e.g. arXiv, PubMed Central*, Humanities Commons)
  • Commercial competitors (ResearchGate, Academia)

* PubMed Central is now also available as repository for authors funded by NWO/ZonMW