[open-science] Why are we leaving it to Google?

Tue Sep 11 10:18:53 UTC 2018

I am all for building a contender to Dataset Search! But let‘s build it on top of existing services, such as BASE that already index datasets. Then integrate it with Open Knowledge Maps, Hypothes.is, ContentMine, WikiCite, OSF and the rest of the open science ecosystem.
Then we would have true contender to the proprietary Googleverse.

The pieces are already there - but who will fund their integration?

Best,
Peter

> On 10.09.2018, at 22:49, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
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> I don't have a problem with Google indexing public datasets. I work with Crystallogrophy Open Database which has indexed 350K data sets. What I take exception to is the way that Big Corporations can buy privileged access to paywalled datasets and publications. 
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> I have a tool which will index science (chemistry, crystallography, phylogenetic trees etc.) much better than Google (which doesn't do these)  but I am not allowed to use it. So  Google and Clarivate are handed a monopoly on indexing the literature even though I can do it better. What is even worse is the way that some publishers (Elsevier) take public data (crystallography) and put it behind the accessWall of the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre. Authors think they are making there data Open, They are not, It's being monopolised by CCDC who sells it by subscription and lets 1% or less out to the rest of the world.
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> I am sure there are many more of these cartels and monopolies.
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> I am happy to hear from others who want to build an alternative search engine to closed monopolists of the scholarly literature because we can do it better.
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> -- 
> Peter Murray-Rust
> Reader Emeritus in Molecular Informatics
> Unilever Centre, Dept. Of Chemistry
> University of Cambridge
> CB2 1EW, UK
> +44-1223-763069