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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