So, how did JURN do in 2014? A quick summary:
* Journals added (in English): I count about 380 linked via the blog. Not counting the Paperity range of titles, or the big influx of ecology related journals.
* Journals added (non-English): I don’t keep count of these via the blog. But I’d guestimate over 100, all titles in the arts and humanities.
* There will have been a natural but uncounted rise, via incremental additions to the non-English journal aggregators. Such as CiNii, Revues, Dialnet etc, which JURN indexes.
* Expanded via the addition of over 250 open ecology related journals, and all known related subject repositories from marine science to ornithology.
* Expanded via incorporating my defunct FUSE business search tool into JURN, adding about 50 selected business journal titles, plus a variety of law titles.
* Expanded to cover science and biomedical, mostly via indexing reputable mega-aggregators of open science articles.
* Direct indexing of PDFs held in all of the UK’s notable full-text university repositories, plus PDFs in the larger full-text repositories in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Other nations also had major repositories added (Nairobi, Kenya for instance), but not in a systematic way. This duplicates CORE somewhat, but provides a useful alternative source for the CSE to draw on for results.
* Direct indexing of the PDFs at many newly discovered subject repositories (from the Getty Virtual Library through the U.S. Air Force Historical Studies Office).
* I ‘opened up the throttle’ on previously indexed dspace / digitalcommons / scholarworks repository URLs, to target all PDFs there (rather than just those of a specific journal).
* A complete close hand-and-eye scrutiny and weeding of the complete spreadsheet of indexed URLs, which took about a month.
* A complete automated checking of all URLs for ongoing appearance on Google Search.
* Ongoing removal of open titles found to be ‘404’ dead or spirited away to a paywall publisher (it happens).
* Ongoing monitoring of the evidence for claims about allegedly ‘questionable’ and ‘predatory’ journals. I find Beall’s evidence on MDPI and ANSINetwork to be lacking, and these publishers are included in JURN (as they are in the DOAJ).
* Ongoing testing of the search results given by JURN.
* A back-end code overhaul for the main landing page and results page at www.jurn.org
* The DOAJ static article records were lost by early 2014. But I was able to get the DOAJ back in again, if only through a clunky indexing at the article title level.
* Severely trimmed back coverage of academia.edu, keeping only the thematic article lists via the URL http://www.academia.edu/Documents/in/*_* (* = wildcards)