Google Scholar as a pointer to open full-text sources of research articles: A useful tool for researchers in regions with poor access to scientific literature

The access to knowledge is an important requirement for advancement of scientific and technological research and development of a country. Availability of resources is a crucial bottleneck for universities and colleges in developing countries. This leads to frequent use of pirate access sites like Sci-Hub by researchers. For instance, India has more than 900 universities and 40,000 colleges, and Africa has more than 1200 universities. Only a few of these institutions would have access to most of the research journals their scholars require. It is in this context that we tried to find out if there exist some resources which can provide links to open and free to download versions of scientific papers. Google Scholar, a heavily used resource for research article searches, is explored to see how effective it is in providing links to open access freely downloadable copies of scientific articles. The complete set of global scientific publications for the year 2016 are computationally analyzed through a web-mining approach, as an example, to see if Google Scholar is able to point to freely downloadable open text versions of scientific articles. Results show that Google Scholar points to full-text sources for about 69% of the articles queried, with about 43% of the articles having openly accessible full-texts. The results, thus, indicate that Google Scholar can be a useful tool for locating open access full-text versions of close to about half of the scientific articles of the world, which has special significance for under-developed and developing countries.