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

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.