List of Society Publishers With Open Access Journals, second edition (Dec 2011). There are about 50 listed in the arts and humanities.
Society Publishers With Open Access Journals, second edition
07 Saturday Jan 2012
Posted in Open Access publishing
Monthly Archives: January 2012
Search guide updated
07 Saturday Jan 2012
Posted in My general observations
JURN’s “A short guide to free academic search” page was refreshed and link-checked today.
A Comparative Study of the Indexing of Open Access Art Journals
07 Saturday Jan 2012
Posted in Academic search, Open Access publishing, Spotted in the news
An interesting new Nov 2011 journal article…
Sian Evans, Hilary Thompson, and Alex Watkins. “Discovering Open Access Art History: A Comparative Study of the Indexing of Open Access Art Journals” (PDF full-text link).
The researchers found 30 art history titles listed in the DOAJ directory. They then looked for the presence of these in Art Full Text, ARTbibliographies Modern, Art & Architecture Complete, and Bibliography of the History of Art / International Bibliography of Art. They found that only 6 of the 30 DOAJ titles were being indexed by these commercial databases. But half the time the actual full-text article was still inaccessible…
“50% of the time [in the commercial databases] there was no indication that the article could be read for free, nor was the full text provided”
By contrast, Google Scholar indexed 15 of the 30 DOAJ art history titles, and provided handy click-through links to full-text articles, albeit at the price of jumbling them in among results from a host of paywalled results drawn from commercial databases, Google Books, and the like.
Of course, JURN indexes all 30 — and the JURN Directory currently links to more than 60 titles in the art history category. Plus journals in museology and heritage conservation, and also the wider collection of history journals.
It was also interesting to read in the article that…
“No study regarding the indexing of open access journals has yet been conducted in the arts”.
Is there really not a single librarian, or even an OA advocate, in the entire world who is or has been interested in such matters?
Sadly, the authors find that…
“the vast majority of open access art scholarship remains undiscoverable for specialists in the field.”
DIY Book Scanner
07 Saturday Jan 2012
Posted in JURN tips and tricks, Spotted in the news
With the seeming demise of the too-long awaited Ion Book Scanner device (now vanished from both Amazon and the Ion website), those seeking to efficiently scan their private libraries might like to look at the DIY Book Scanner website…
It has plans, shopping lists, photos of items needed, and well… just about everything. If you can’t build it yourself, anyone on a decent salary should be able to find the funds to pay a couple of their neighborhood hobbyists to build one for them. It looks transportable, so perhaps a group of academics could pool their cash to get one built, then share the scanner.
Annotum
05 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted in Open Access publishing, Spotted in the news
Annotum is now available. First mooted in March 2011, it’s now a new WordPress theme that aims to deliver a….
* simple, robust, easy-to-use authoring system to create and edit scholarly articles
* an editorial review and publishing system that can be used to submit, review, and publish scholarly articles
An open-source, open-process, open-access scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress, built on the Carringon Theme framework. Annotum provides a complete, open-access scholarly journal production system including peer-review, workflow, and advanced editing and formatting features such as structured figures, equations, PubMed and CrossRef reference import, and structured XML input and output compatible with the National Library of Medicine’s Journal Article DTD.
Could be especially useful for university librarians who have journal management foisted on them?
British Academy event on OA
05 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted in Spotted in the news
A British Academy event in London Open Access: The New Future of Academic Publishing?, on 12th January 2012.
Why name authority was pulled from Google News
05 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted in JURN's Google watch
So, now we know why journalist name authority was removed from Google News results. The evil curse of Google+ -ification of search…
“Google+ is the new SEO. Just look at what it’s done to Google News. In the name of highlighting authors, it now pulls in Google+ profiles [from Google’s new competitor to Facebook]. It doesn’t let the author choose, say, her own website as her profile. If she wants a clickable, personal link on Google News, she has to use Google+.”
I have no problem with Google trying to take on Facebook (competition is something which seems to be destined to improve Facebook, a service I intend to stick with). But the Google+ and other distortions of search results are becoming very annoying.
Google Verbatim
01 Sunday Jan 2012
Posted in JURN's Google watch
A new Google feature you might have missed in the rush to Christmas. Google has a new “Verbatim” option, which bypasses the appallingly dumb second-guessing that gives results that assume “and” is what you meant when you typed “India”, or that “biography” is what you meant when you typed “bibliography”…
With Verbatim turned on, we’ll use the literal words you entered without making improvements such as…
* making automatic spelling corrections
* personalizing your search by using information such as sites you’ve visited before
* including synonyms of your search terms (matching “car” when you search [automotive])
* finding results that match similar terms to those in your query (finding results related to “floral delivery” when you search [flower shops])
* searching for words with the same stem like “running” when you’ve typed [run]
* making some of your terms optional, like “circa” in [the scarecrow circa 1963]
Great though this is to see, it confirms that people who actually want to do proper search are now second-class citizens in the Googlesphere.
University libraries, student research culture, and Google use
01 Sunday Jan 2012
Published at the end of September 2011, the book College Libraries and Student Culture: What We Now Know (ALA Editions). This from the Inside Higher Ed coverage of the research in the run-up to publication…
“… the Illinois researchers found something they did not expect: students were not very good at using Google. They were basically clueless about the logic underlying how the search engine organizes and displays its results. Consequently, the students did not know how to build a search that would return good sources. (For instance, limiting a search to news articles, or querying specific databases such as Google Book Search or Google Scholar.) Duke and Asher said they were surprised by “the extent to which students appeared to lack even some of the most basic information literacy skills that we assumed they would have mastered in high school.” Even students who were high achievers in high school suffered from these deficiencies, Asher told Inside Higher Ed in an interview.”
Seriously, they were surprised? Surely anyone who teaches undergraduates could have told them this?