Monthly Archives: April 2016

Google wins on Google Books

19 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by in JURN's Google watch, Spotted in the news

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“Google wins long US court battle” over Google Books…

Google’s massive book-scanning project has cleared what may be its final legal hurdle, with the US Supreme Court denying an appeal that contended it violates copyright law. The top US court on Monday denied without comment a petition from the Authors Guild to hear the appeal of a 2013 federal court ruling seen as a landmark copyright decision for the digital era. […] Google said in a statement after Monday’s decision, “We are grateful that the court has agreed to uphold the decision of the Second Circuit [appeals court] which concluded that Google Books is transformative and consistent with copyright law.”

Added to JURN

16 Saturday Apr 2016

Posted by in Ecology additions, JURN metrics, New titles added to JURN

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Frontiers of Biogeography (International Biogeography Society. Not to be confused with a journal from the publisher Frontiers)

JURN’s A-Z List of eco/nature journals now lists over 700 titles, open access or otherwise free to the public. That total does not include the additional lists of hybrid OA titles and mapping titles, found at the foot of the main A-Z list.

Added to JURN

15 Friday Apr 2016

Posted by in Ecology additions, New titles added to JURN

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Ars Medica : a journal of medicine, the arts and humanities

Victorian, The (Victorian period)

Leeds African Studies Bulletin

PaleoBios (University of California, Museum of Paleontology)

Palaeohistoria (archaeology and carbon dating)

Asia Research Institute, Working Paper Series

JD : Journal for Deradicalization

Canadian Field-Naturalist, The

eJIM : ejournal of Indian Medicine (traditional medicine, history of plant use)

Open Music Library – beta

14 Thursday Apr 2016

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Alexander Street Press’s new Open Music Library has launched in beta. I gave it a 30 minute test. The OML uses a very odd definition of “Open”, once one gets to the actual fulltext link on a purportedly OA item. To the OML “Open” seems to mean either “erm, actually it’s behind a paywall” or “hey, it might be on Google Scholar, go look there…”. I’m guessing that this may be due to the curators building the OML from within an academic campus office. So perhaps they see items as open, whereas the outside world only sees a paywall?

oml

The OML icons also contribute immediately to the sense that something is awry with the OML. People going to a public site called Open Music Library will expect to see friendly orange Open Access symbols, not forbidding black padlock-key signs (which are on the majority of the journals listed) indicating paywalls…

omlpaywalled

Of the 94 journals listed on OML, 28 lack the padlock-key symbol. JURN indexes all of the latter, and a few hundred more on aspects of music and musicology.

More vaccines madness at OMICS

14 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by in Ooops!, Spotted in the news

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More vaccine-conspiracy nuttiness has been published by the OMICS Publishing Group, aka OMICS International. Galalae, K. (2016) “Turning Nature against Man: The Role of Pandemics, Vaccines and Genetics in the UN’s Plan to Halt Population Growth. Epidemiology, 2016 6:232. The article claims a total global eugenics conspiracy by the U.N….

“All epidemics and pandemics of the past 30 years are fabrications of the UN system and its partners in crime at the national level for the purpose of lowering births below the magic line of replacement level fertility and, more recently, also for limiting life to an economically acceptable and environmentally sustainable age.”

The last such article got pulled by OMICS after a while (I hear the whining about such things, regrettably, because I take a daily glance at the raw feed for “open access” via Twitter Live) so I guess this article may also be pulled soon. Although it seems to have been up for a month now, judging by the dates on the PDF.

There are no OMICS journals indexed in either the DOAJ or JURN, though it appears that their journals are indexed in JournalTOCs and Google Scholar in substantial numbers, and “Turning Nature against Man” is currently discoverable via Google Scholar.

loons

Lukol.com

13 Wednesday Apr 2016

Posted by in JURN's Google watch, Spotted in the news

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Thanks to The Register for pointing out a search-engine that’s new to me, the Russian Lukol.com. Lukol claims to be a wholly anonymous search engine. So how is Lukol different from the non-tracking and privacy measures offered by DuckDuckGo? Lukol claims that…

“When we obtain enhanced results from Google, we tunnel your search query through our proxy servers, without exposing your search data.”

I’ve given it a quick test, and it seems to work fine and supports filetype:pdf. Basically it seems to be Google Search + URL-matched pictures + news down the side. I’m thinking Lukol might be useful for academics who want to search the Google Search index, in-depth and in very complex ways, without triggering anti-robot countermeasures from Google’s bots?

lukol