Kiran Bapna
Business Development
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA
kiran@google.com
Fax: 650.618.1840
Tele: 650.623.5187

cc: NIH, DOAJ, Nobel Foundation

21 February 2005

Dear Kiran Bapna and Google Scholar Team,

I read with interest recent News on possible integration of <http://scholar.google.com/advanced_scholar_search>Google<http://scholar.google.com/advanced_scholar_search> Scholar with CrossRef Search Pilot.

The latest CrossRef Newsletter stated that "Google would like to use the DOI as the primary means to link to an article so CrossRef and Google will be working on this as well as a template for common terms and conditions for use of publishers full text content." (Ed Pentz, <http://www.crossref.org/01company/10newsletter.html#anchor8>CrossRef Search Pilot, CrossRef Newsletter, February 14, 2004).

I would like to alert you that Google intention "to use DOI as the primary means to link to an article" may leave a significant portion of quality scholar literature out of a deserved public visibility. As you should know the CrossRef membership is expensive and apparently targets big for-profit (as well as not-so-for-profit big scholar societies') publishers. Please see CrossRef Fees Page at <http://www.crossref.org/02publishers/20pub_fees.html> and make a note that the first fee category is for publishers making <$1 million publishing revenue.

CrossRef membership apparently is not designed to serve not-for profit small independent scholar publishers, many of which recently turned to a so called Open Access (OA) Publishing model when scholar literature is served with no access barrier and free of charge to scholar audience and the public. As you might know many of those who sit on <http://www.crossref.org/01company/05board.html>CrossRef<http://www.crossref.org/01company/05board.html> Board of Directors strongly oppose the Open Access movement.

My earlier appeal filing with CrossRef Administration (due to an inability of the Neurobiology of Lipids [indexed in Google Scholar non-profit journal run by scientists with no help of a commercial publisher] to afford CrossRef high annual fee) raised no interest/effort at CrossRef to resolve this matter and to find out the solution to handle such issues in future.

According to the quoted above CrossRef latest newsletter, "The CrossRef Search Committee is also continuing discussions with Google on a number of technical issues, such as making sure coverage of CrossRef member content is complete and crawling of content is as efficient as possible."

CrossRef Affiliation with Google may further escalate the cost of DOI: "For 2005 there is a fee of 5% of the annual membership fee for participation in the [CrossRef Search] Pilot. This is to cover CrossRef's administrative costs", the quoted above CrossRef Newsletter says.

Away from overtaking CrossRef board big publishing houses' corporate/private interest one may wonder what will be the public interest in Google facilitation of the raised DOI cost. Please think of it and consider other (then DOI) linking alternatives for quality scholar literature.

Such high quality alternatives do exist, and I do hope Google will consider alternative partnership opportunities when further developing Google Scholar. Two major suggestions are itemized below:

1. You have to know that of one thousand and a half scholar serials indexed in <http://www.doaj.org/>The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ<http://www.doaj.org/>), great number of titles provide article level meta data with unique DOAJ identities and links to free access articles' full text at the Publishers' web sites.

2. Another major possibility is to link Life Sciences Google article indices to articles archive in NIH PubMed Central (PMC, a free archive of life science literature backed by National Library of Medicine and by the National Institues of Health, the major US funding agency of quality Life Sciences research) and/or PubMed/Medline (a truly major source for any life science researcher, health care provider and lay person seeking quality scholar health info).

You should be aware that just two weeks ago NIH released its' new "Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research" (release date 3 Feb, 2005; Effective date 2 May 2005). This policy asks scientists to deposit their articles (previously published or to be published in peer-review journals) in PMC, and should stimulate many more journals joining PubMedCentral to meet the NIH request on behalf of authors.

Please see the full text release of NIH New Policy ( <http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-05-022.html?issn1683-5506link> ), and a reaction on it by a number of leading news agencies and scholar publications (such as <http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_01_30_fosblogarchive.html#a110747019241674419>Reuters, <http://www.forbes.com/lifestyle/health/feeds/hscout/2005/02/03/hscout523826.html>Forbes,<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62156-2005Feb3.html> W<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62156-2005Feb3.html>ashington Post, <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article/article?f=/c/a/2005/02/04/MNG8TB5L3A1.DTL&type=health>San Francisco Chronicle, <http://www.nynewsday.com/news/health/ny-hsacc044134476feb04,0,7183542.story?coll=ny-health-headlines>New York <http://www.nynewsday.com/news/health/ny-hsacc044134476feb04,0,7183542.story?coll=ny-health-headlines>Newsday, <https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/1592.html>Pu<https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/1592.html>blic Library of Science,<http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/pr-releases?pr=20050204>BioMedCentral, <http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050131/full/050131-20.html>Nature, <http://neurobiologyoflipids.org/newsstand/2005/02/neurobiology-of-lipids-welcomes-new.html>Neurobiology of Lipids, etc; for more stories see <http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_01_30_fosblogarchive.html>Open Access News archive), and an <http://www.nih.gov/about/publicaccess/publicaccess_imp.pdf>implementation plan for the policy.

Quoting Reuters report: "NIH director Dr. Elias Zerhouni said: "With the rapid growth in the public's use of the Internet, NIH must take a leadership role in making available to the public the research that we support". Why not to combine the government commitment with the potential of the Google scholar to bring public access to medical literature to a new never-before-seeing heights?

I hope that after reading quoted above materials on NIH Public Access Plan you will come to realize that the time is right for Google to seek collaboration with NIH.

I also would like to caution you regarding another statement by CrossRef, saying that "The CrossRef Search Committee feels that CrossRef Search still provides a valuable service as a search focused on authoritative, peer-reviewed literature from a known set of sources. Google Scholar is a very broad search of all the web and includes any material that "looks scholarly" and the material comes from an unknown set of sources. Therefore, the schedule is for results from CrossRef Search to be delivered from Google Scholar starting in April (the results now come from the regular Google index)."

As you can learn in details elsewhere, indexing by CrossRef (or any other scholar database) is not an endorsement of the scholar publication quality or a panacea against the fraud. Sad examples come from American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Elsevier (both <http://www.crossref.org/01company/05board.html>sitting at CrossRef<http://www.crossref.org/01company/05board.html> board), whose major publications editor did not disclose industry ties. The question on whether such high posts served ones private interest, impaired the public trust in biomedical publication and caused harm to patients was studied in details in <http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we125.htm>a testimony for a UK Parliamentary Commission<http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we125.htm> on Science and Technology, and as <http://neurobiologyoflipids.org/content/3/2/neurolipids032004-01.html>a letter to President GW Bush. It is unfortunate that AAAS Science magazine and Elsevier do nothing to ammend things and to restore the impaired trust in their publications.

Sincerely,

Alexei Koudinov, MD, PhD
Founder and Managing Editor
<http://neurobiologyoflipids.org/myjournalindex.html>Neurobiology of Lipids ,
<http://dopingjournal.org/mydopingjindex.html>Doping Journal