Google Goes Over the Wall
May 2004

While Google prepares for its IPO, it continues to make innovative moves to access information that is behind firewalls. Much of the world’s most authoritative and valuable electronic content lives behind firewalls, where it is accessible only to subscribers or authorized users. Large amounts of scientific, professional, and academic research fall into this category. One such example is scholarly journals, which carry subscription costs of hundreds or even thousands of dollars per year. Google recently announced an agreement with CrossRef, a consortium of over 100 journal publishers, whereby Google will be able to index the full text of journal articles and conference proceedings. CrossRef will work with Google to facilitate the cataloging f content on the sites of its member publishers. This arrangement will make both current content and back issues show up in Google searches, and users will be able to link to publishers’ sites for access to the full text. Depending on the rules of each publisher, users will still need to subscribe or purchase individual articles in order to get access to an article. Even so, this move is a breakthrough in making such content part of Google’s reach. Librarians have long complained that while search engines make it easy for anyone to find information on the web, users often cannot judge the authority of information that they find. Journal content, much of it peer-reviewed, represents the upper end of quality content. Since many academic libraries do subscribe to scholarly journals, their users will be able to view any articles they find on Google.

The current pilot, which will run through 2004, includes nine participating publishers: American Physical Society, Annual Reviews, Association for Computing Machinery, Blackwell Publishing, Institute of Physics Publishing, International Union of Crystallography, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University Press, and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Google’s move to access content behind firewalls is an important development for content aggregators and owners of premium or proprietary content. As their content becomes discoverable, content owners and aggregators will be able to increase their markets. They will, of course, have to build mechanisms for converting referrals from search engines into individual document sales, subscriptions, or some other monetary benefit. These ideas are not lost on the major aggregators, such as LexisNexis. Look for these companies, among others, to start making deals to allow search engines to spider and index their content.