[UPS] RE: free online access to 137,000+ science articles

[Michael L. Nelson]

>this could be an edifying competition, if having the most FREE articles
>becomes a selling point

an extremely worthwhile competition, IMO.  perhaps an annual "prize" or
some other recognition by an appropriate agency would go a long way to
further driving competition.  never underestimate the value of a piece of
decorative plastic to show to managers...

Having said that, I have serious issues with methodology apparently
employed in the press release:

http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/largest.dtl

"Earth's Largest Free Full-Text Science Archives"

assuming the operative words are "free", "full-text" and "science"

* GPO Access - http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/db2.html
* Project Gutenberg Electronic Public Library - http://promo.net/pg/
* Thomas Legislative Information on the Internet - http://thomas.loc.gov/

all valuable resources, however, to borrow a phrase, "but is it science?"

* United States Geological Survey - http://www.usgs.gov/

maybe I did not search long enough, but through:
	http://usgs-georef.cos.com/
	http://greenwood.cr.usgs.gov/formal/reports.html
I could not find "free" or "full-text" reports.  

Furthermore, this press release highlights the need to distinguish between
"data providers" and "service providers".  For example, these service
providers are not included:

* ResearchIndex - http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs 
claims access to 250k+ full text documents.  but these documents are
spidered from various existing archives.

* NTRS - http://techreports.larc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/NTRS
discounting the ADS documents it provides access to (300k+), there are
still 17k+ documents accessible by NTRS.  provided from smaller archives
(e.g., 7k, 6k, 2k, etc.)

whether or not service providers should be included in such a list is
debatable; perhaps a separate list is called for.

regards,

Michael

---
Michael L. Nelson             
NASA Langley Research Center  m.l.nelson@larc.nasa.gov
MS 158, Hampton VA 23681      http://home.larc.nasa.gov/~mln/
+1 757 864 8511               +1 757 864 8342(fax)