Massive and growing volume of free research on the Web: 27 million documents and counting Journalist's Resource: Research for Reporting, from Harvard Shorenstein Center

" ... Now, with the rise of the Web and powerful search engines such as Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search, more and more of the world’s deepest knowledge is made accessible, at least in summary form, to a global audience. And through the open access movement, more scholarship is open to the public, without pay walls, through institutions such as the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), Harvard’s DASH database and MIT’s DSpace. The PubMed database indexes more than 20 million health studies, an increasing percentage of which are made open by government mandate. This means that more data and research insights are now made “deadline friendly” to anyone doing public communications on the Web, conducting business or exploring personal questions around health, for example. This sea change in the availability of empirical knowledge and research data opens vast possibilities that have yet to be fully explored ..."