Monthly Archives: February 2019

OOIR

12 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by in Academic search, How to improve academic search, Spotted in the news

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The new OOIR List. Currently with 849 journals in its List, these being from Web of Science’s SSCI journals in social studies. 119 of the titles on the OOIR List are flagged as Open Access, though a good number of these are greyed-out and not tracked (because they don’t bother to also submit to CrossRef).

Evidently Web of Science only covers 119 such OA titles, which means its OA coverage in this area has hardly budged since 2015 when Web of Science was only showing 116 titles in OA in social studies.

Within that very limited range, what OOIR is trying to do with its titles seems interesting, by providing an aggregated ‘latest’ / ‘trending’ / ‘active journals’ dashboard. It’s neatly presented, and there are also per-journal metrics over on the Statistics tab.

Apparently the service is focussed on recent papers, and “OOIR does not link to papers published before Nov 2018”. A previous RSS-feed based version, for politics and diplomacy, was titled Observatory of International Relations (OIR). But this has now been shut in favour of OOIR.

I guess the question now is, would it be possible to build something bigger and similar and slightly shinier, that could provide a public tracking-dashboard for all such material of use to those interested in timely new research on politics, diplomacy and related matters? Zak Kallenborn has some ideas on that in his recent article “Academic Paywalls Harm National Security”.

Multi-line search and replace in Notepad++

12 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks

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One of the slight drawbacks to the popular Notepad++ freeware is its lack of a multi-line search-and-replace which is friendly to non-programmer users. This can be corrected with a simple free plugin.

1. Download ToolBucket, extract its .DLL file and place this in your Notepad++ plugins folder/directory.

2. In Notepad++ go to the top menu bar. Plugins | Plugins Admin | scroll down and select ToolBucket | Install | OK.

3. On restarting Notepad++ you will now have multi-line search-replace, albiet under Plugins rather than under the native Replace menu item.

Note that for macros, multiline search-replace needs to be done as the more tricky: \n command with ‘Extended’ checked. I had no success getting a macro to record the above plugin.

(There have recently been annoying changes to the plugin folder structure in Notepad++, which have broken many older plugins — if you install to Program Files and this plugin doesn’t work, try installing it in its own folder under Plugins. If that doesn’t work then try installing it down in User / Appdata, again with / without its own folder).

How to turbocharge your repository

07 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by in How to improve academic search, Spotted in the news

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“Repository optimisation & techniques to improve discoverability and web impact: an evaluation” (2018)…

provides persuasive evidence that specific enhancements to technical aspects of a repository can result in significant improvements to repository visibility […] traffic to Strathprints from Google and Google Scholar was found to increase by 63% and 99% respectively.

PaperBot

05 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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“PaperBot: open-source web-based search and metadata organization of scientific literature”, BMC Bioinformatics, 24th January 2019.

Seems to offer a way to swiftly and cheaply identify Open Access full-text public papers at the sites of the big publishers, even if they’re salted away in hybrid journals…

“We introduce PaperBot, a configurable, modular, open-source crawler to automatically find and efficiently index peer-reviewed publications based on periodic full-text searches across publisher web portals. [It is shown to operate across varied UIs on] a wide range of sources including Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, PubMed/PubMedCentral, Nature …”

Looks good, though so far only tested on the relatively well-behaved biomedical literature in brain science. Semantic Scholar has been doing this for a while now (and the results are in JURN), but so far as I know their crawler bot is not public.

JURN is 10 years old, tomorrow

02 Saturday Feb 2019

Posted by in JURN metrics, My general observations

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Super. I’ve realised, and just in time, that JURN is 10 years old tomorrow!

JURN was launched by me in working form on 3rd February 2009, and then went onto the new Jurn.org domain on 5th February 2009. Initially the search-tool only had a mere 951 arts and humanities journal titles, indexed and full-text searchable at the article level. The fledgling JURN Directory followed shortly after. JURN certainly wasn’t the search behemoth it is now, after a decade of often very intensive work on it, but the launch caused a ripple of interest and some enduring inbound links.

As users and readers of this blog will know, JURN has been constantly maintained, repaired and expanded since then. All the work has been done unpaid. Despite very sparse donations each year (some years with nothing at all), over a decade JURN has just about ‘broken even’ in terms of paying for domain and hosting costs.

Several new services have been added since launch, such as the comprehensive repository search GRAFT (‘Global Research Access, Full-Text’) and the OpenEco A-Z journal directory. The scope of JURN’s journal indexing has also expanded a little beyond arts and humanities journals, to strong coverage of business and law journals, and journals on all aspects of the natural world. As always, predatory titles and publishers are excluded.

JURN continues and OA continues to grow, so… onward to 2029!