Eric wrote:

> What do y'all think of this idea, a full-text index to the content of
> open access journals?
>
> The phrase "open access journals" seems to be gaining popularity to
> denote freely available scholarly journal content. There is a directory
> of such content in the Directory of Open Access Journals:
>
>    http://www.doaj.org/
>
> What if someone, like us, were to mirror and/or crawl the content of
> these open access journals and index the content. Wouldn't that begin
> to demonstrate to the scholarly community that if they publish in these
> titles, then access to them will be assured? Wouldn't such a project
> increase access to these titles, and help improve scholarly
> communication?

In my copious spare time I hacked together an application indexing
selected library-related electronic serials from the Directory of Open
Access Journals. From the half-baked system's About statement:

   DOAJ Index is YAMSI (Yet Another Mr. Serials
   Implementation). It's goal is to create a full-text index
   to (library related) scholarly literature in order to
   facilitate scholarly communication. I believe that if the
   library profession demonstrates the ability to collect,
   organize, archive, index, and provide access to freely
   available scholarly materials, then freely available
   scholarly materials will more likely to available. (This
   may very well be a circular argument.)

   http://dewey.library.nd.edu/morgan/doaji/?cmd=about

The About statement goes on to briefly describe how the system is glued
together, and how it can be improved.

What would be really cool would be an full-text index all open access
journal literature. Unfortunately, the metadata in these titles, even
the library-related ones, is not very strong. This lack of metadata
also makes the search interface rather weak. GIGO.

--
Eric Lease Morgan
Head, Digital Access and Information Architecture Department
University Libraries of Notre Dame

(574) 631-8604