1

I would like to find a search engine over open access materials of all kinds, but specifically from scholarly publishers.

So to be clear, it could be a specialised encyclopedia or encyclopedia article, or a journal article, or a book or book chapter, but it would essentially be a search over everything that a serious academic publisher has declared “open access”.

How could I do this?

Julius Hamilton
  • 663
  • 1
  • 2
  • 12
  • Related: https://academia.stackexchange.com/q/5145/17254 – Anyon Nov 15 '21 at 20:47
  • Seems pretty unlikely, other than Google. – Buffy Nov 15 '21 at 20:48
  • @Buffy, recently, Google Scholar seems to try to figure out if a paper is open access or not, at least in my profile a separate tab has appeared telling visitors how many of my papers are freely accessible. However, the data is so grossly incorrect/incomplete that it cannot be relied upon at the moment. So, at least for academic publications, Google apparently does not help much. – Snijderfrey Nov 15 '21 at 21:05
  • @Snijderfrey, I'm not surprised, but my intent was different. Google itself tries to index everything visible. Other things have a more restricted charter. There are a lot of academic fields. – Buffy Nov 15 '21 at 21:08
  • 2
    Have you talked with your local, friendly, research librarian? – Jon Custer Nov 15 '21 at 22:36
  • 2
    everything that a serious academic publisher has declared “open access”. -> even if there was such a single search portal, this condition would be extremely hard to satisfy: who would decide whether a publisher is serious or not?. Additionally this would exclude all the open-access repositories like arxiv. – Erwan Nov 15 '21 at 23:49
  • Google Scholar will search over all the things mentioned in the question. @PeterElbert, do you mean that you want to exclude from your search anything that is not open access? If that is not required, then Google Scholar is the answer. If that is required, then I think this question is, for all intents and purposes, a duplicate of https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/5145/how-to-get-academic-search-engines-only-search-in-open-access-journals. – David Ketcheson Nov 16 '21 at 07:25
  • Maybe. This is more what I had in mind, but it's just for articles: https://doaj.org/. Can Google Scholar do advanced search for encyclopedia articles? It seems like you can just keyword search it and it links to PDFs found but it's possible there is more open access material that it just didn't find the link to. So it's just not very thorough overall – Julius Hamilton Nov 16 '21 at 13:16
  • There's this tool called "Reference Universe" which is an attempt at a one-stop shop for searching across all possible reference materials available on a topic, but it's for research libraries to search over their holdings. I'd like Reference Universe across open access materials. It sounds very technologically feasible. – Julius Hamilton Nov 16 '21 at 13:17
  • @Erwan I actually don't think so, sorry. I'm pretty sure a line can be drawn between university presses and non-academic publishers. De Gruyter, Oxford, Cambridge, University of Hawaii, etc. It's ok if Arxiv is excluded. It's just academic publishers + open access. – Julius Hamilton Nov 16 '21 at 13:19
  • @PeterElbert you're thinking only about the most famous universities which have massive publishing activities. There are thousands of smaller universities which don't have the same volume (and possibly standards). There are also a few big and a lot of small commercial editors, as well as a many independent scientific associations which publish their own proceedings and journals in their specific domain. – Erwan Nov 16 '21 at 13:37

0 Answers0