I’m writing this mostly for the students in our own Distance Education program at Athabasca University, but it may be of interest to others holding access to a well connected research library.
By way of disclosure, let me state that I love and use Google Scholar on a daily basis. The only thing I don’t like is when I use regular Google searches or Google Scholar on another machine (like at a cafe). When I do, I continuously run into publishers wanting my credit card for a $30.00 hit for the article I’m searching for. I mean, the authors were paid nothing for the article and it may be well out of print, yet I should pay $30.00 – not likely!!!
I’m a faculty member at a Canadian University and like all faculty, students and staff here I get ‘FREE’ access to a variety of proprietary journals that are aggregated to make paying their fees easier for me and for the library administration. At Athabasca, I’m told we pay $350,000 (Canadian) per year for this service. This gives us most (in my case maybe 95%) of the journal articles I am interested in retrieving. Thus, lots of incentive to use the service. The problem, is how do I know what articles my Athabasca library card provides for free! The gurus at Google figured this out, by scanning all the Athabasca collections and then they match any of my Google Scholar search results with a flag to “get this through Athabasca Library”. Or as Google itself describes it “Google works with libraries to determine which journals and papers they’ve subscribed to electronically, and then links to articles from those sources when they’re available. Once you tell us what library you’re a member of, we’ll keep an eye out for that library’s subscription materials and provide special links to them in your search results”. It then automates the search process by creating a direct link (no cut and paste, or retyping) to that article – after a quick and once a day trip to the library login window. Thus, I am saved the trouble of searching directly in the library database and I get free access. All Good!