Accessing Quality Open-Access Literature to Enable Teaching, Learning, and Industry

摘要

Commercial control of the world's published literature has grown to the point where costs are prohibitive for developing nations. This article describes a computer engineer's response to this problem. The result is a publicly-accessible meta-search engine that focuses on open-access sources. With one set of keywords, this engine searches many engines at the same time. It has been used to help develop entire courses based solely on open-access literature. While there are excellent search capabilities for open-access literature that deliver full and searchable text, none of these cover the entire space. To examine a larger space, one must manually employ numerous engines. Herein is a discussion, background, vision, and top-level dataflow for the author's publicly-accessible meta-search engine that evolves with the needs of education, training, and industry.