10 Wednesday Jun 2009
Posted in New titles added to JURN
I added four URLs to the JURN index. These bring in full-text entries from the dictionaries of national biography for Australia, New Zealand, the British Isles (just the free online pages from the otherwise-commercial DNB), and Canada (just the English-language entries):—
http://adbonline.anu.edu.au/biogs/
http://www.dnzb.govt.nz/DNZB/alt_essayBody.asp?essayID=*
http://www.oxforddnb.com/public/dnb/
http://www.biographi.ca/*-e.php?&id_nbr=*
09 Tuesday Jun 2009
Posted in Economics of Open Access, Spotted in the news
News just in from Canada…
“Small magazine publishers and editors are fighting proposed changes to Canadian Heritages’ magazine funding criteria that will bar subsidies to any publication with an annual circulation of less than 5,000. That’s most academic journals, art magazines and literary magazines in Canada…”
09 Tuesday Jun 2009
Posted in JURN metrics, New titles added to JURN
Nice; over 1,100 Spanish-language open access ejournals, in an elegant and uniform combined directory/TOCs/article-server format. No registration required, no silly fuss about “on-campus access only”.
And gasp in awe — it has uniform-format article-linked tables-of-contents across more than 1,100 titles. Gasp again when I say it seems to be up-to-date, PDFs speed to your browser faster than a hungry ferret, and it has no broken links I could find.
Either the Spanish set up a wonderful infrastructure circa 1999, or they’re archiving by hand?
And before you ask; yes, the articles it offers (mirrors?) are showing up in Google in a managable way — and are thus now also experimentally showing up in the JURN search results. But I won’t be adding another 1,100 to the JURN home-page title total.
It might have been better if they had set a distinctive URL-string for the open arts and humanities titles, though, rather than having all types of journals sitting on the same URL-string. This means the articles are included in JURN at the price of bringing in some pages that just give a basic reference only, and not all articles are from arts and humanities titles (though around 2,000 are, both pay and open) — but that shouldn’t trouble most people searching in English for arts and humanities phrases. I think it’s a price worth paying, just this once, for such a huge ‘one-URL’ haul of full-text articles. Many thousands of which are in English, by the way.
07 Sunday Jun 2009
Posted in JURN metrics
After a final weeding out of blogs, trade directories, artist directories, .XLS, .XML etc files, and even a little more spam, I think JURN is now as finished as it’s ever going to be. It took almost exactly four months to build. Enjoy.
07 Sunday Jun 2009
Posted in Economics of Open Access, Spotted in the news
A Portico report from May 2008 “Digital preservation of e-journals in 2008: Urgent Action revisited” (PDF link). From the summary…
“there is a pronounced gap between thinking that the digital preservation of e-journals is important and taking action to ensure that e-journals are preserved. … Many library directors
expressed a desire to wait before taking action. … preservation of e-journals, while valued, has not yet become a strategic budgeting priority for many libraries”
07 Sunday Jun 2009
Posted in Academic search
Full Text, an independent scholars group on Twine. It’s run by Daniel Lipson, periodical librarian at Achva Academic College…
Most of the world’s research resides in [commercial] online academic databases … To use these databases and find full text peer reviewed articles, you must have access to an academic library. This twine is for those who don’t.
There are free databases and scholarly search tools on the web that may not be as comprehensive as the above examples, but are a good start for “academics without access” and “researchers without resources”.
Those interested in this post may also be interested in the ebook The Independent Scholar’s Handbook (PDF, 17Mb) (Ten Speed Press, 1993 – second edition), now freely offered online by the Canadian Academy of Independent Scholars and Simon Fraser University.
06 Saturday Jun 2009
Bingo! Towards a description of a low-overhead academic Firefox plugin for the discovery and sharing of free scholarly articles:
1. At the click of a toolbar button, a web-browser plugin ‘reads’ the text of an online academic paper you’re browsing (inc. a PDF if it’s opened within a browser). It seeks and finds the references / bibliography section.
2. The plugin automatically detects any full well-formed academic references in the standard formats, extracts and de-duplicates these, and then uses javascript to create simple new links. Each of these new links is built on-the-fly and embeds the exact title of the article, alongside the surname of the author. Possibly these links could be presented in a sidebar, or even as a page overlay. The plugin doesn’t try to seek or add any direct URLs for the article.
e.g.: it would search for… Craig “Werewolf Cinema of the 1930s”
3. The user can set the plugin to feed the overlay link to the main Google index or some other suitably deep search engine.
4. If the user clicks on such a “fuzzy” overlay link, they will hope to discover a direct link to the free full-text of the article near the top of the search results.
5. If they do find free full-text, then the user has the ability to click a simple feedback button on the browser toolbar. This passes the surname and article title information back to a public database of open academic article titles.
6. If it’s an article name/title the database hasn’t seen before, it will flag that unique combination of author and article title as having a reasonable probability of leading to open full-text. The database could also do automatic tagging and sorting by academic discipline, as judged by detecting common keywords and phrases in the title(s). At no time are any URLs (or downloading of pages/PDFs by the plugin database) involved in the process.
Once the database is established, in version 2.0 of the plugin a feedback loop might be created. The database would now indicate, via a three-star rating alongside the link, if the title had a high probability of being freely available somewhere. This might not need a dedicated server — the plugin might instead locally install a huge list of free article titles as detected by v1.0. For user convenience this list could be split up by discipline.
The plugin is thus using Surname “Article title” as the implicit unique identifier for the article, which is good enough for a search-engine even if it probably causes librarians to shiver in horror.
The database can’t use journal titles to determine if an article should be flagged as “likely to be free”, since journal titles are rarely extractable or detectable by search-engines in individual open-access articles. Nor can it use base URLs, since the plugin aims to completely bypass the need for direct-to-article URLs. The public database of open academic article titles would need to be hidden from search-engines, so as not to contaminate search results.
06 Saturday Jun 2009
Some good news, just in. The U.S. courts have struck down a legal challenge to the popular open source journal citation software Zotero.
“Zotero […] operates as a browser plug-in, which allows it to cross platforms easily and integrate well with online searches; it is also able to import EndNote reference databases. But the key feature that got it into legal trouble was the fact that it was able to import and use EndNote reference style files.”
06 Saturday Jun 2009
“Journal spend, use and research outcomes: a UK perspective on value for money” (PDF link), by Ian Rowlands at the UK Serials Group Conference, 31st March 2009. In amongst the inevitable science journals (yawn), his group also made a case-study of History ejournals. One interesting factoid…
“86.5 per cent of titles in the arts, humanities and social sciences are now available online”
Only 86.5%?
From the same conference: “Electronic journals, continuing access and long-term preservation: roles, responsibilities and emerging solutions” (Powerpoint link, 2Mb). It seems a useful overview of the problems, and the initiatives (LOCKSS, Portico, etc) currently underway.
Short-run open access titles in the arts and humanities are especially vulnerable to loss, judging from my experience of finding one too many “404 not found” and domain-squatted pages while building JURN. One solution that springs to mind might be to build into open access journal software an automatic “collect all the articles into a single POD-ready printable 8″ x 10″ PDF and upload it on publication to a print-on-demand book printer” (such as Lulu). National deposit libraries could then access a uniform printed (although probably not archival/acid-free) copy for their stacks. And so could anyone else who wanted a printed copy.
Another rather more humourous idea might be to have a Big Red Button integrated into the journal’s software control panel — especially useful for graduate Cultural Studies ejournals perhaps — marked:
“We can’t be bothered any more, upload everything to archive.org and then delete the website”
Of course, a ‘brute force’ approach would be to buy a fat new hard-drive and then run site-ripper software (free tools such as the British Library Web Curator Tool and the independent WinHTTrack spring to mind) on the JURN Directory. But there’s a problem — many independent ejournals keep their article files at a radically different URL than that of the home website. A third of the time you’d end up with a nice snapshot of the website, but no articles. Unless you could specifically tell the software to download all unique off-site files/pages that were being directly linked to by the targetted website (that’s if you’re lucky and the journal doesn’t use scripted “bouncing-bomb” URLs that dynamically bounce into repositories to get the PDF). But then, many journal entry-points are just a page on a larger departmental website — so you could end up hauling in terabytes of unwanted material either way.
Or for a more managed solution, one could spend £12,000 paying students at £12 an hour to spend an average of 40 minutes per title (across 1,700 titles), to go in and hand-archive all the articles and TOCs into named directories on a hard-drive. Even if management bloated the cost, I’d guess an initial archival capture could probably be done for less than £50k? Heck, I’ll do it myself if someone wants to offer me £50k.
Of course, if librarians had made and promoted just one simple little Google-friendly tagging/flagging standard for online open-access journal articles… then none of this would have been needed.
05 Friday Jun 2009
Posted in Academic search
Paul Stainthorp at Lincoln University (in the British Isles) has quantified the real-world electronic journal usage he’s seeing at the library…
“12% of all our usage — one eighth — derives from journals which we don’t pay for. Most of this is from journals listed in the EBSCO Open Access Journals package.”
He’s put together a handy pie chart…
According to EBSCO, this is a package of “nearly 2,000” open access titles, including science, medicine, politics, business, etc.