Google Scholar Indexes Open Access Books

The length of monographs and their level of treatment pose unique challenges in a search environment. Monographs generally describe mature work unlike journal articles, which usually describe early stage work. As a result, it can be hard to achieve a successful search experience for restricted access monographs, according to Anurag Acharya of Google Scholar.

After asking Acharya (co-founder of Google Scholar) why Google Scholar did not index monographs, Frances Pinter of Knowledge Unlatched (KU) says, "I realized that such challenges fall by the wayside with Open Access books."

Pinter explained that the dataset of 28 books from the KU Pilot was likely to be too small for Google to try out on open books. "So I told Anurag Acharya about OAPEN's platform and its nearly 2,500 Open Access books," says Pinter.

OAPEN and Knowledge Unlatched are pleased to announce that Google Scholar is now able to index Open Access books hosted by OAPEN.

About Google Scholar
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, users can search across many disciplines and sources. Google Scholar helps users find relevant work across the world of scholarly research. Now, Google Scholar is able to index Open Access books. See http://scholar.google.co.uk/

About Knowledge Unlatched
Knowledge Unlatched is an award-winning not-for-profit organisation committed to creating a positive change in scholarly communication landscapes by helping libraries to share the costs of publishing high quality specialist scholarly books and making them available in Open Access. By working together libraries and publishers can create a sustainable route to Open Access for scholarly books.  KU has launched its second collection, Round 2, and hopes to 'unlatch' another 78 books in early 2016. More at http://collections.knowledgeunlatched.org

About OAPEN Foundation
OAPEN is dedicated to Open Access for academic books. The OAPEN Library (www.oapen.org) is a full text platform for Open Access books, supporting publishers, funders and libraries, with quality assurance, deposit, dissemination, discovery and preservation.

The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB, www.doabooks.org), also provided by OAPEN, is a discovery service for Open Access books.

Contact
Christina Emery, Partnership Manager, Knowledge Unlatched
[email protected]