Elsevier Begins the Journey to Openness

For all its faults, lovingly detailed in this blog, Elsevier seems slowly to be getting the hang of this Internet stuff:

About Google/Google Scholar: we're making good progress. As you may be aware, we did a pilot with some journals on SD first, and now we are working to get them all indexed. We're making good progress there - it's a lot of content to be crawled, but going along nicely. Both Google Scholar and main Google are gradually covering more and more of our journals.

SD is ScienceDirect, which claims to contain "over 25% of the world's science, technology and medicine full text and bibliographic information." Not open access, of course, but at least Elsevier realises that opening up its holdings to become searchable is a good idea. Now it's just got to complete the journey.