Summary: We now have an a google device for searching out scholarly writing. It is "Google Scholar". I spend some thought space considering the level of "wonderfulness" of this online innovation. Increased access to a world of knowledge is NOT a value that is evidenced by this development - not for "everyperson"

The following is Google's summary of Google Scholar's purposes/functions:

About Google Scholar

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications.

Please let us know if you have suggestions, questions or comments about Google Scholar. We recognize the debt we owe to all those in academia whose work has made Google itself a reality and we hope to make Google Scholar as useful to this community as possible. We believe everyone should have a chance to stand on the shoulders of giants.

[Go to Google's FAQ for more details [note please that purpleslurple has allowed me to link within the the web page--using a granular address constructed on the fly.]

My experiments with this new resource lead me to believe the resource's name might be fully expanded to: "Google Scholar: A Resource for Those Deeply Enmeshed in the Scholarship Industry (and/or those with money to burn)." My Google Scholar searches led most often to proprietary resources which, if I were to access them, would cost from 10 to 50 dollars per resource. (The abstracts themselves are free but insufficient in the face of any serious effort to process the ideas, evidence and arguments involved) On the other hand, searches in Google itself (the original) or Yahoo etc. afforded me resources which were far more substantial and free.

There are reasons for the charges, of course. One of those reasons: to pay for the archiving and labeling system (which can "absolutely" tag the provenance of a given documents via a "digital object identifier" technology.
CrossRef notes that the new technology allows, "a collaborative, cross-publisher reference linking service that turns citations into hyperlinks, allowing researchers to navigate online literature at the article level ". Attempts to recover costs and even to profit a bit from innovation are certainly "legitimate". There is also the bigger picture, of course; think of a world in which all are afforded equal opportunity, from this moment forward, to bootstrap their own, better future. That world is less likely if intellectual resources are held tightly by those presently rich in knowledge resources. (see SciDev.net's position papers on the topic).

As Patrick Brown, publisher of the free new Public Library of Science (PLoS) journal PLoS Biology and advocate for free access to new knowledge, has put it:

Charging for access is therefore no longer economically necessary, rational or fair -- it needlessly limits access to an essential public good.

What's the alternative? Just as midwives can earn a living without claiming ownership or control of the babies they deliver, publishers can and should be paid a fair price by the sponsors of the research -- a "midwife's fee" -- for their role in orchestrating peer-review, editing and disseminating the results. But they should not be given the baby -- our baby -- to own and control. By paying publishers for each article at the time of its publication, instead of allowing them to own the article and charge for access, the doors to the online library could be opened to everyone.

An "open access" system for scientific publishing will not entail new expenses, nor should it place a financial burden on the authors. The governmental and private institutions that finance the research already pay most of the costs of scientific publishing indirectly -- through the funds they provide to research libraries. These same institutions would accomplish far more with the same money by phasing out subscription payments to restricted-access journals and, instead, paying for open-access publication of the research they support.

Donald Kennedy, editor in chief of Science magazine makes a counterargument concluding that neither "charge per read" nor "free read" can claim the moral high ground.

---

Based on my own views and the arguments accessed so far, I'm with Mr. Brown. Let "all" knowledge be accessible to all. Let's see what kind of world we construct when privilege, earned and unearned, assumes a lesser place in determining the success of one's efforts to survive, prosper and be happy.