open access

According to a recent online study, students and faculty consider it attractive for free, downloadable scientific research to be used for citation as published research available through online subscriptions.

The study, released Thursday by BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal, showed that browsing open-access research is more popular among scientists and students, but the free works were not necessarily as frequently used as subscription-only documents.

Google says it participated in the recent wireless spectrum auction not with the goal to win, but to help drive bidding high enough to ensure that open-access rules it had pushed for would be adopted.

"Google's top priority heading into the auction was to make sure that bidding on ...