05 Saturday Oct 2019
Posted in My general observations, Ooops!
The Peter Lowe ad-blocking list is obviously now worthless, due to its over-reach and scattergun blocking of all sorts of legitimate things. Back in June I found it blocking Harvard. I’ve since found all sorts of similar blocks on things that should not be blocked. I’ve unsubscribed my browser’s ad-blocker addon from the Peter Lowe list, and I suggest that you also consider doing so.
08 Thursday Aug 2019
Posted in Ooops!
Google Search’s captcha’s are becoming intensely annoying. You can’t seem to go more than five pages of results deep with the same search before Google throws up a captcha, even with a relatively unsophisticated verbatim search such as “author name” “annotated”. And it’s not happening because I’ve been hammering the service in other ways.
02 Tuesday Jul 2019
Posted in Ooops!
A demonstration of the limited range Google.com can offer, these days. One of the top all-time greats in science-fiction literature, at page six of the results on his distinctive name. The results dribble away to spam and essay-writing services, at a mere six pages and 103 results. Searching for the name with capitals, as “Clifford Simak”, makes no difference.
11 Tuesday Jun 2019
Ooops. Harvard’s Astrophysics Data System server, a huge public repository of astronomy and space flight papers and books, blocked because… it has ‘ads’ in the URL? Does ad-blocking get more block-headed than this? Thankfully, I see it’s now possible to tell uBlock to ignore the rule, which didn’t used to be possible.
Update: The Peter Lowe list is obviously now worthless, due to its scattergun blocking of all sorts of legitimate things. I’ve since found all sorts of similar blocks on things that should not be blocked. I’ve unsubscribed my Ad-blocker from the Peter Lowe list and suggest you do so as well.
28 Sunday Apr 2019
Posted in Ooops!
The Knowledge UChicago repository for the University of Chicago appears to have recently changed its primary URL path for records.
Was: /handle/
All such URLs now give ‘404’ with no redirects, though are still present on Google Search for now.
Now appears to be: /record/
11 Thursday Apr 2019
Posted in Ooops!, Spotted in the news
Ooops. Apparently the EU’s police plods are demanding that Archive.org take down all of the Project Gutenberg content…
“Included in the list of takedown demands are a bunch of the Archive’s “collection pages” including the entire Project Gutenberg page of public domain texts, its collection of over 15 million freely downloadable texts”
These form-pushers obviously have no clue that this will have quite the opposite to the intended effect. Instead of suppressing it, they will cause the material to become even more widely available and known. Partly through all the publicity, and partly through the efforts of free-speech activists to mirror an uncensored Gutenberg. They’re also politically clueless, having managed to instantly bring into disrepute the EU’s new laws.
10 Sunday Mar 2019
Posted in Ooops!, Spotted in the news
“Missing documents in Scopus” (March 2019)…
“their study revealed an unusual high number of citations for the documents published by the journal” [Enfermeria Nefrologica, but] “only 50.2% of the documents published by the journal between 2006 and 2017 were registered by Scopus.”
21 Thursday Feb 2019
Posted in Academic search, Ooops!
A new February 2019 paper, from the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies, testing existing methods for auto-detection of OA papers in Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus. The conclusions are about what you might expect — that it’s easier said than done, even with such well-behaved services, and even then it’s partial.
But as part of the study a research assistant valiantly undertook further manual checking by hand. They found that OA full-text links there were broken at a rate of 17%…
“a further manual check found about 17% of OA publications are not accessible … 17.57% in WOS and 16.74% in Scopus.”
24 Thursday Jan 2019
Posted in My general observations, New titles added to JURN, Ooops!
I’m pleased to say that I’ve managed to regain jurn.org — and the domain and URL are once again functioning and public. My apologies for the hiatus over the last six months or so.
You can, of course, also continue to search JURN via one of the other access methods which are detailed at this blog post.
28 Wednesday Nov 2018
Posted in JURN tips and tricks, Ooops!, Spotted in the news
Has your ad-blocker (and other scripts) stopped working in the Opera Web browser today? It’s nothing to do with changes made by Google, Bing, Yandex etc.
What’s happened is that Opera has high-handedly decided to disable all adblocker and script-blocker addons from running on search-engine results pages. Thankfully, for now, the browser still has an option to turn off this unwanted and highly dangerous stupidity (disabling script-blockers etc) from the owners of Opera. Here’s the fix…
“For some reason Opera with the latest update have decided to add a new option for extensions that will disable them by default for “search page results”. You’ll have to go to top bar > Menu > Extensions > and then scroll down and tick the box “Allow access to search page results” for your addons. After that it will work normally again.”
You need to do this for each addon that affects search engines and their results, for example…
If you have a JURN link on your Google Search menu bar, via my UserScript, to get it back make sure to also enable TamperMonkey for Opera…
