The Open Knowledge Foundation adds a “Website for finding and searching OA humanities journals” to its Ideas Incubator.
OKF proposes new search-engine
21 Wednesday Sep 2011
Posted in Ooops!
Author Archives: futurilla
Sidebar checked
20 Tuesday Sep 2011
Posted in My general observations
The JURN blog’s sidebar has been checked for dead or lapsed blogs, run-out-of-funding projects etc. Cleaned, and added some new links.
Ion ISC02 Book Saver goes to Amazon pre-order
19 Monday Sep 2011
Posted in My general observations, Spotted in the news
Amazon.com are now taking U.S. pre-orders for the Ion ISC02 Document Scanner. No sign of it on Amazon U.K. yet. ETA is rumoured to be December 2011. At $190 it’s going to be a bit more expensive than the $150/£129 it was first touted as back in January 2011. I’d guess about £159 in the UK, if Amazon UK ever gets them in stock.
I’d imagine that images captured at that distance won’t have the massive resolution that standard OCR software is used to, unless Ion have something special happening with the camera lens (an array of multiple cheap lenses for gigapixel capture?). But if general software such as Adobe Acrobat Pro can OCR even tiny footnote text from the page images, then the Ion ISC02 is going to be a winner.
DOAJ article-level indexing leaps over 3,000 journals
19 Monday Sep 2011
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) team leaps over the “3,000 journals indexed at article level” line. The press release was actually for 7,000 in the Directory listings, but only 45% of these are indexed/searchable at article level. Hence the DOAJ is now at about 3,100 in terms of being a search tool, and must have crossed the 3,000 line sometime in the late summer.
At current count, 905 of the Directory records are for journals in the arts and humanities (1081 if you include linguistics), with an unknown number of that subset searchable at article level. If the “45% indexed” figure holds true for arts and humanities, the DOAJ might be searching around 450 such journals at the article level.
The Location of Academic Knowledge
18 Sunday Sep 2011
The Location of Academic Knowledge (journals by country) included in Web of Knowledge *. Click for larger version.
From: Graham, M., Hale, S. A., and Stephens, M. (2011) “Geographies of the World’s Knowledge”. Oxford Internet Institute & Convoco.
* Web of Knowledge subsumes Web of Science, and includes Journal Citation Reports, Science Citation Index (1945+), Social Science Citation Index (1956+) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (1994+). ‘High impact’ journals, inc. around 1,300 major arts and humanities titles in Arts and Humanities Citation Index. One might keep in mind, however, the 2009 Gale Reference Review comment that… “I looked at the widely touted figures [for journal numbers] in the promotional materials [ of Web of Science and Scopus and found ] they should not be taken for granted. Many of these are incorrect and exaggerated. Their compilation has been fast and loose, sometimes making them fiction rather than fact.”
JURN checked and updated
12 Monday Sep 2011
Posted in New titles added to JURN
I’ve checked the JURN Directory using Linkbot:—
* Discovered and fixed about 15 broken URLs, and also fixed these in the Search URL database if needed.
* Added 18 new journal titles.
* Removed from the Directory and Search URLs database, because dead: Thlazine; Cybermetrics; Altitude; Inbhear; Broadsheet; Yemen Update; Mouseion (gone to live behind the Project Muse wall, seemingly?); Italian Politics and Society; Journal of Philosophical Practice; Views; Text, Practice and Performance; Digital Document Quarterly.
JSTOR free before 1923
12 Monday Sep 2011
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
JSTOR are offering free worldwide access to journal articles published in the USA before 1923. This is 6% of JSTOR’s content. No log-in required, no Hathi-like fuss about “which country are you in, because your government might have passed a ridiculously extended copyright law”. Just go to Advanced Search, tick the box for “Include only content I can access”…
Opening up open access, with a crowbar
01 Monday Aug 2011
Posted in Spotted in the news
Now there’s a guy who wants his open access…
“Aaron Swartz, a Cambridge web entrepreneur and political activist who has lobbied for the free flow of information on the Internet, was charged in federal court with hacking into a subscription-based archive system at MIT and stealing more than 4 million articles, including scientific and academic journals.”
MIT was apparently just a conduit to access JSTOR. Did he actually release them to the world?
JURN checked and repaired – July 2011
07 Thursday Jul 2011
Posted in New titles added to JURN
All the JURN Directory links were checked using Linkbot, with 10 changed URLs repaired.
A list of all URLs in the main JURN Index were checked for continuing presence on the Google Search Index, using Google Index Verifier. URLs containing wildcards were trimmed back before being checked. Missing URLs were repaired or deleted.
In the past month around 65 titles have been newly added to the JURN search index.
Firefox users: how to remove the Google +1 button from search results
29 Wednesday Jun 2011
Posted in JURN tips and tricks, JURN's Google watch
For Firefox 5 users, this is a simple way to remove the annoying new Google +1 button from your search results:
UPDATE, 20th July 2011: the previous AdBlock Plus solution stopped working at 13th July. Google changed something. I have now amended the instructions to work with their new code. What follows works at 20th July…
1. Open Firefox. Go to the top menu bar | Tools | Addons | Adblock Plus | Options
2. In your Filter option add…
www.google.com##BUTTON[class=”esw eswd”]
Don’t be tempted to add a “http://” in front. Save and exit the Adblock Plus options.
3. Restart Firefox. The distracting animated buttons are gone. If you run on some other national version of Google, try replacing “.com” with your national domain (like .uk or .ca).