Monthly Archives: June 2012

Google Scholar: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

17 Sunday Jun 2012

Posted by in Academic search, JURN's Google watch

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“Google Scholar: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly“, a short free Powerpoint from the University of Leeds in the UK. It’s a useful up-to-date summary, but I’d worry about the document’s opening claim that Google Scholar has… “Almost 100% coverage of journals from partner databases and publicly available TOCs”. A casual glance at this statement may mislead people into assuming that Google Scholar has complete coverage. It doesn’t. As I’ve said before, it is rather poor at including the contents of large numbers of open access arts and humanities ejournals.

Questia to revamp, relaunch

13 Wednesday Jun 2012

Posted by in Academic search

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I hear that Questia is to… “relaunch this summer with an all-new updated look and feel”. Questia is a low-cost commercial buffet-style online research library, aimed at students. It claims to be… “the world’s largest online collection of books and journal articles in the humanities and social sciences”.

Incidentally, I also note that Open J-Gate hasn’t come back online after five months away — it went offline in February 2012 and is now just a holding page. Does anyone know if it’s likely to be coming back?

‘Nope, no content to see at JURN, move along now…’

11 Monday Jun 2012

Posted by in Ooops!

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An odd comment on JURN by Peter D. Verheyen (of The Book Arts Web), 19th May…

Jurn.org is good for finding articles, but does nothing to actually deliver and serve the actual content

It’s surely a simple matter of clicking on the links to get the full text. For instance, all the PDFs of Peter’s Bonefolder magazine are linked, in the first page of search results for “Bonefolder”.

A fluster of reports

02 Saturday Jun 2012

Posted by in Economics of Open Access, Official and think-tank reports, Open Access publishing

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A new report, from commercial academic publishers, asked UK libraries what the results might be of the government’s plan for universal open-access with an embargo period of six months…

“Nearly a quarter of [the 210 libraries that responded] would cancel their humanities and social science subscriptions entirely.”

A further report suggest another problem — that papers simply won’t be presented by academics to their repositories…

“The PEER findings […] indicated that the vast majority of academics did not self-archive their work even when asked to do so.”

Perhaps UK universities should declare that journal articles won’t count toward future career advancement, unless they are deposited in a timely manner?