A large well-designed website in Spanish, offering advice and tools for publishing open access ejournals.
[ Hat-tip: Technolama ]
16 Monday Jan 2012
Posted Open Access publishing
inA large well-designed website in Spanish, offering advice and tools for publishing open access ejournals.
[ Hat-tip: Technolama ]
14 Saturday Jan 2012
Posted Academic search, Spotted in the news
inThe paywalled JSTOR service is set to offer 70 of its 1,400 journals for free, albeit hedged around with restrictions. But…
“if it works out, JSTOR says, it could expand the program to most or nearly all of the database” […] says it has been turning people away from seeing an article 150 million times a year”
The service already offers public-domain articles (before 1923) for free.
14 Saturday Jan 2012
Amazon has made available new Send to Kindle desktop Windows software. It works a lot like Instapaper, but can send any file found via your Windows Explorer.
PDF features in the banner, but I’ve not yet seen how badly it mangles PDFs on conversion. Possibly Amazon may not try to covert at all, but rather just send PDFs ‘as found’? That’s fine for the Kindle Fire tablet, but PDFs are a pain to view on the Kindle ereader.
You also get a ‘Send to Kindle…’ option in all “Print” dialogues, including that of your Web browser.
13 Friday Jan 2012
A handy new four-page advocacy briefing sheet from Research Libraries UK Open access: impact for researchers, universities and society. Although note that it doesn’t mention the poor level of indexing and search findability.
12 Thursday Jan 2012
Some interesting new data mining projects are shortly to get underway. They’re aimed at making ‘smart’ software bots that make life easier for researchers…
* automated tracking/mapping of topic lifecycles, across all forms of scholarly discussion
* automatic identifying of common forms of argument used in different disciplines
* software to automatically generate Dewey Decimal Classification-based tags from existing repository metadata
* software to automatically generate links to texts discussing the same persons, places and events
I’d say No.3 has a good chance of success.
12 Thursday Jan 2012
Just published, details of the number of open access ejournals in the state-controlled Chinese National Knowledge Information (CNKI) database…
“We identified and analysed the 147 journals offering open access (OA) among the 2960 scholarly journals indexed by the Chinese National Knowledge Information (CNKI) database in the humanities and social sciences”
Dehau Hu. “The availability of open access journals in the humanities and social sciences in China“. Online at the Journal of Information Science, 4th January 2012.
In 2009 it was reported there were “1,856 print journals in the humanities” in the CNKI. It indexes journals from 1915 onwards. The pages were apparently until recently ‘hard’ scanned images of pages, in order to prevent keyword searches of full-text. No journal publication outside of the CNKI is permitted. PDFs are now available via this service.
Previously on JURN blog…
Chinese set out measures to control academic corruption
12 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted JURN's Google watch
inLifehacker has instructions on how to prevent Google+ from distorting your Google Search results.
09 Monday Jan 2012
Posted JURN metrics, My general observations
inJURN Search has been fully checked for the continuing presence of indexed articles on Google Search results, via the use of adapted software meant for checking SEO backlinks in the Google index. The last such in-depth ‘linkrot’ check on the article URL index was undertaken in July 2011. Repairs have been made where needed, and around 100 URLs have been either fixed or deleted. 14 new titles have been added.
09 Monday Jan 2012
Beall’s List of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers, new 2012 Edition.
08 Sunday Jan 2012
Posted My general observations
inThe JURN Directory has been checked by Linkbot for dead or moved links. Removed five dead or vanished journals: Notitiae Cantus; Journal of Media Psychology; Grassroots Editor; Journal of the Int’l Guild of Musicians in Dance (is now members only), and Arkeotek (old DOAJ records now lead nowhere). Six broken URLs were fixed. Added ten new titles.