Open-i : OA Biomedical Image Search Engine. I tested their collection of x-rays, but found them to be pointlessly small. It appears that the items are all figures auto-extracted from CC medical papers, rather than hi-res scans.

There’s what may be the start of a flurry of long-form press publicity for Sci-Hub: “Meet the Robin Hood of Science” at Big Think, and “The Research Pirates of the Dark Web” at The Atlantic. Did they hire a good publicist, I wonder?

Also from Moscow, a new long Interview with CyberLeninka’s Chief Strategy Officer in English. It’s very long and I haven’t yet read it all that closely, but there are obviously some interesting statistics and also trenchant comments about Russian attitudes to predatory journals and to OA repositories.

“The Moscow-based CyberLeninka … reports that it currently hosts 940,000 papers from 990 journals, all of which are open access, and approximately 70% of which are available under a CC-BY licence. Significantly, it has achieved this without the support of either the Russian government, or any private venture capital… The service was created, and is maintained, by five people working from home.”

“Since ROAR indicates that CyberLeninka has just 257 records we might want to take these [ROAR] figures [on Russia] with a large dose of salt…”

Not content with ruining Flickr with bloat, painfully slow loading and a clunky new UI… now Yahoo are scaling it down…

“Flickr will be scaled down, and will soon see some cutbacks in near future. … will soon be operated with minimal overhead…”

One day we’ll marvel at a Ken Burns-style documentary feature-film, which will recount exactly how gross mis-management turned Yahoo’s excellent suite of Web services into a puddle of worthless mush in just a few years.

Ho hum, here we go again… “France Wants to Ban Linking to Any Site Without Permission” and “Will Europe’s highest court now kill off hyperlinks?”

A new Ngram-based search tool for repositories, from an Australian student. openaccess.xyz is based on…

“A recent harvest of .edu, .gov, .ac and .org university websites, which I performed, produced around 16,000,000 papers. … I decided to prune a clean set of records (taking only the papers with near perfect metadata – dates, abstracts etc) and then present them in a Bookworm (the software which inspired the Google Books Ngram Viewer).”

As a keyword-based search tool it seems to give very poor results, judging by my test search for nesting bumblebees ecology. But, as an interface design for public search, it’s quite interestingly unusual.

For this early beta it might have been made made more useful by filtering the papers to make the focus much tighter. For instance, perhaps just a focus on the flora and fauna of Australasia.

IsisCB Explore is a public bibliographic search tool, from the History of Science Society and the University of Oklahoma…

“Nearly 200,000 interlinked bibliographic citations to books, chapters, articles, dissertations, and reviews from the Isis Bibliography of the History of Science 1974 to present. Annually updated.”

Rather annoyingly it misleadingly touts itself as “An open access discovery service”, when what that headline claim actually means is simply that “it’s public”.

On testing, it lacks an OA search facet on the sidebar.

On a search for electric light I tested four random articles from 54 results. One was in India, only a link to a journal home page. One was in a paywalled Taylor and Francis journal (£30 to “rent” the article for 24 hours!). Another was in a paywalled Cambridge UP Press journal (£20 access). The fourth was in a Taiwanese journal which declared “You do not currently have access to this content”.

I’m not sure how fresh the DOI Web links are, either. The first three DOI links I tried all proved to be broken.