The dark side of Open Access in Google and Google Scholar: the case of Latin-American repositories

摘要

Since repositories are a key tool in making scholarly knowledge open access,determining their presence and impact on the Web is essential, particularly inGoogle (search engine par excellence) and Google Scholar (a tool increasinglyused by researchers to search for academic information). The few studiesconducted so far have been limited to very specific geographic areas (USA),which makes it necessary to find out what is happening in other regions thatare not part of mainstream academia, and where repositories play a decisiverole in the visibility of scholarly production. The main objective of thisstudy is to ascertain the presence and visibility of Latin Americanrepositories in Google and Google Scholar through the application of page countand visibility indicators. For a sample of 137 repositories, the resultsindicate that the indexing ratio is low in Google, and virtually nonexistent inGoogle Scholar; they also indicate a complete lack of correspondence betweenthe repository records and the data produced by these two search tools. Theseresults are mainly attributable to limitations arising from the use ofdescription schemas that are incompatible with Google Scholar (repositorydesign) and the reliability of web indicators (search engines). We concludethat neither Google nor Google Scholar accurately represent the actual size ofopen access content published by Latin American repositories; this may indicatea non-indexed, hidden side to open access, which could be limiting thedissemination and consumption of open access scholarly literature.