An enormous free index of scholarly literature was released on October 7, raising copyright questions, Nature reports. The General Index—which searches more than 100 million journal articles—allows researchers to automatically search a vast amount of published work, including articles protected by paywall. Previously, scholars have only been able to search within articles they subscribe to, and publishers have controlled access to such computerized searches, known as text mining. Creator Carl Malamud says that the index is not a breach of copyright because it only contains words and sentence fragments — albeit 355 billion of them — not the entire text […]
