I too have been following the discussion on the SFX support list Peter mentions, and have been hoping he or someone of his calibre would blog about it, making it easier to summarize and include here. I didn't do a count on the opinions, but I sense that many on the aforementioned list are leaning towards wanting to mutiny and not provide Google Scholar with this extra information on moral grounds. I'm sure many will though, and I guess we'll have to learn from these early adopters if it's worth breaking the spirit of the OpenURL rule. Here at the U of C we have a hosted implementation of SFX, so we can't do anything until sometime in June when the switch is flipped for us by Ex-Libris. I had hoped that at the end of his post Peter would give us the definative answer on how to proceed, but alas...
OpenURL-enabling Google Scholar
Google Scholar has offered OpenURL links for a while on a trial basis, and now the service is open to any library. We’ve started to tinker with it but we haven’t turned it on yet. Over the last couple of days there has been a lively discussion on the support list for our link resolver, and a few points have become clearer to me as a result.
- Google still only provides OpenURL links for a minority of citations — apparently just those with reliable identifiers such as DOIs or PubMed ids
- Google wants to know what we subscribe to before they provide OpenURL links for our users, so that they can distinguish links that will get you full text and links that won’t.
Our link resolver can now generate holdings lists in the format Google wants, so this isn’t a technical challenge. But, as many people have pointed out, Google wants to provide its OpenURL service in a different way from all our licensed vendors. We don’t provide a holdings list to them, so why should we for Google?
more...
[via Quædam cuiusdam]
