Google Scholar’s open-access move ‘sends a powerful message’ - Research Professional News

To the delight of proponents of open access, Google’s search engine for scholarly literature has begun to include information on open-access publishing in its author profiles. On 23 March, users of Google Scholar started noticing that a Public Access section had appeared in their author profiles, showing how many papers that should be free to read due to funder requirements actually are. A coloured bar will now appear under researchers’ public profiles, with green indicating articles that should be free to read and are, and red showing apparent breaches of the rules. “Many funding agencies have added public access mandates to promote broad access to funded research. This helps researchers everywhere build on what their colleagues have discovered,” wrote Google’s Akash Sethi and colleagues in a blogpost. The search engine will also link to open versions of authors’ articles. Scholars will be able to update the list of mandated articles on their profile and make corrections.