18 Tuesday Mar 2014
Posted in Spotted in the news
A print history conference, Readers, Purveyors, Creators, and Users: Studying Victorian Print Consumption (Ireland, June 2014) is interested in papers on open access and paywalls…
* The planning, design, and use of digital resources in the study of nineteenth-century print culture, including debates surrounding open access and paywalls.
17 Monday Mar 2014
Posted in JURN's Google watch
The Google Cultural Institute website is new to me. It seems Google has a Pinterest, sort of. It appears to work in much the same way as Pinterest, but the pictures are drawn from images in various hi-res/open museum digitisation collections.
No ‘kitties in art’ collection yet, although searching for “cat” will get you a big kittie fix if you’re desperate.
16 Sunday Mar 2014
Posted in JURN tips and tricks
Tabula. Free Windows software to copy-and-paste rows of data out of PDF files, and into plain CSV format, through a simple interface. You do need the Java runtime installed on your PC, though, which is a huge security risk. But it may be worth it, if you regularly need to move tables of data from PDFs to MS Excel or similar database software.
16 Sunday Mar 2014
Posted in My general observations
Ross Mounce discusses the problems of blogging snippets from CC BY-NC-ND articles which forbid derivative works. Here’s a live example from Europeana. They couldn’t display a title-page preview, even if they wanted to, due to the no-derivatives licence…
Perhaps we need a little ‘show only a user-defined area’ PDF embedding widget like the excellent Snippage. Snippage lets you display a user-defined frameless fragment of any Web page on your Windows desktop, and have it refresh at regular intervals. Here it is in action on my desktop…
This is the BBC 5-day UK weather, snipped down to a live two-day tile. A version of Snippage for blog embedding of PDFs would of course embed the whole PDF (a bit clunky, but doesn’t violate the licence…), yet would show only a user-defined area of a specific page. Firefox’s open HTML5 render engine for PDFs might be the underlying tech to make it work.
Or we could just use a screenshot and plead ‘fair use’.
15 Saturday Mar 2014
Posted in Ecology additions, New titles added to JURN
A new category has been added to relevant posts on this blog: Ecology additions, for posts noting new ecology related additions to the JURN index. WordPress gives it its own RSS feed, which may be handy for some.
15 Saturday Mar 2014
Posted in Academic search
Mendeley now has an open access search filter check-box for its catalogue search. Although unfortunately it currently considers JSTOR articles to be open access. For most of us they’re not, beyond the first page.
Europeana has the same problem, containing linked records pages for JSTOR content which isn’t open and public (e.g: “History of the churches of India” – Europeana links to it, it’s public domain, but JSTOR has the only copy and wants $10 to access it).
15 Saturday Mar 2014
Posted in JURN's Google watch, Spotted in the news
One of Google’s public data-driven prediction systems has caught a cold, according to weighty new research…
“Google Flu Trends, which launched in 2008, monitors web searches across the US to find terms associated with flu activity such as “cough” or “fever”. It uses those searches to predict up to nine weeks in advance the number of flu-related doctors’ visits that are likely to be made. The system has consistently overestimated flu-related visits over the past three years, and was especially inaccurate around the peak of flu season — when such data is most useful.”
The doctors prescribe taking a healthy dose of national health statistics…
“Merely projecting current CDC data [doctors’ visits as recorded at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] three weeks into the future yields more accurate results than those compiled by Google Flu Trends. Combining the two resulted in the most accurate model of all.”
Although one has to wonder about prediction feedback loops here. What if Google Flu Trends was actually right? But that Trends-watching doctors, carers and the public all put into effect various extra measures that stopped the Trends prediction from coming true in the longer-term six-to-nine week window? Or what about some kind of media amplification loop: more media chatter hits the news as the epidemic surfaces into the public mood, meaning that non-sufferers start using the relevant keywords more in social media?
15 Saturday Mar 2014
Posted in Open Access publishing, Spotted in the news
Knoth, Petr (2013). “From open access metadata to open access content: two principles for increased visibility of open access content”, conference paper presented at: Open Repositories 2013, 8th-12th July 2013, Charlottetown, Canada.
… only 27.6% of research outputs in repositories are linked to content that can be downloaded by automatic means and analysed (e.g. indexed). […] the median repository will only provide machine readable content for 13% of its deposited resources. [but] it is likely that these statistics are in fact rather optimistic …
14 Friday Mar 2014
Posted in Spotted in the news
Bing has introduced a new one-click image match search feature…
13 Thursday Mar 2014
Posted in Ecology additions, New titles added to JURN
Perhaps it’s down to the influence of the publicity for the new Noah movie (heh), but I’ve made various additions today that mean JURN now has reasonable coverage of open access ecology and ornithology (birds) journals. Or perhaps its just because they’re currently a nicely compact set of ejournals and open resources, and as such are fairly easy to include. Thanks to Writing for Nature for his recent trawling and filtering of the DOAJ for core ecology titles, and to Ornithology Exchange for a big and fairly current list of ejournals in ornithology, complete with a handy side-table linking to any open access volumes. JURN is, for now, only indexing the more current of the OA titles on the Ornithology Exchange list.