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Scientific Method / Science & Exploration

Oxford University Press launches the Anti-Google

Wikipedia and Google can quickly drown researchers in a sea of data, some of …

Crowdsourced knowledge repositories like Wikipedia are great for finding the answer to questions that aren't particularly urgent or critical, but their problems are legion, well-documented, and oft-lamented if you're trying to use them for serious work—especially scholarly work. Search engines aren't any better for scholars, because Google searches not only produce way too much information for even the most obscure topics, but they also don't tell you which sources experts would consider really important. 

It turns out that for certain topics, the crowds just aren't very wise, and algorithms even less so—in these situations there's no substitute for old-fashioned expertise, but that expertise can be hard to come by if your professor's office hours are booked solid.

Oxford University Press thinks it has the answer, or at least a first shot at the answer, for these problems with the launch of what could fairly be called the Anti-Google: Oxford Bibliographies Online (OBO).







To get an idea of what a section's editorial board looks like, check out the "About" page for the Classics topic. The EIC is Dee L. Clayman of CUNY, and the board consists of 17 of the top classics scholars in the field. The topic has a total of 51 entries written by 38 different scholars.

Evaluations of each scholar's work and worth will differ, but at least users can see exactly how the sausage is made. Contrast this to Google or Bing, where the search algorithm that produces results is a closely guarded secret.

The word that Zucca used a number of times in our chat was "authority," and OUP is betting that individual and institutional users will value the authority enough that they'll be willing to pay for access to the service.

As of today's launch, OBO is either $29.95 a month or $295.00 a year. This pricing will be too steep to fit in most student budgets, so OUP is probably counting on generating most of its revenues from institutional subscribers.

This paywall is the only feature of OBO that seems truly unfortunate, given that the competition (search and Wikipedia) is free. High school kids and motivated amateurs will be left slumming it with whatever they can get from the public Internet, and OBO's potential reach and impact will be severely limited. But even if a paywall is the only model that works for funding this kind of specialized content, at least it's an improvement over what came before.

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