Category Archives: Ooops!

Robo-censorship doesn’t work

19 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by in Ooops!, Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

A new post from an elected member of the European Parliament (MEP), Julia Reda in Germany. “Out-of-control censorship machines removed my article warning of out-of-control censorship machines”…

“A few days ago, about a dozen articles and campaign sites criticising EU plans for copyright censorship machines silently vanished from the world’s most popular search engine. Proving their point in the most blatant possible way, the sites were removed by exactly what they were warning of: Copyright censorship machines.”

When ‘open’ is closed

05 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by in Ooops!

≈ Leave a comment

Ooops…

Impact of Open Offices on Collaboration (Royal Society)…

Contrary to common belief, the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approx. 70%) in both cases [in ‘open’ offices], with an associated increase in electronic interaction. In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM.

JURN returns

01 Tuesday May 2018

Posted by in My general observations, Ooops!

≈ 1 Comment

Sticky post: 1st May 2018. Un-sticked: 24th January 2019.

Ooops. I left off all JURN activity for a month, to write a book (Tolkien, 180,000 words), and… the jurn.org webspace has vanished. The webspace hosting service got badly hacked, a while back, and the account details became disconnected from the credit-card details. The site’s still all there, just made inaccessible by the provider. I’m now considering my options, re: switching hosting/domain.

Anyway, while I get it sorted out, JURN is still accessible here:

JURN Search

This is a link to the ‘raw’ CSE page which is maintained by Google, and of course it never goes down. I see that it now offers the options for sort-by-date and image-search, which the fancy front-page was able to offer. It’s not so pretty or easy to remember the URL for, but it does the job.

The Directory of 3,000 arts & humanities journals in JURN can be had on this blog as a saved PDF.

And finally, GRAFT, my beta ‘all known repositories’ search-engine is still accessible, again via the Google-hosted version…

GRAFT : repository search, searching across full-text and records alike.

Update: With a UserScript addon you can integrate JURN right into Google Search. For instructions and links, see my blog post: JURN ‘in a UserScript’.

Update: You can also add JURN to your Bookmarks bar as an Itty.bitty link. An Itty.bitty link is the Web page, encapsulated within the bookmark itself.

Figured it out

30 Friday Mar 2018

Posted by in JURN metrics, Ooops!

≈ Leave a comment

Ooops. ‘Figures’ pages were being indexed in JURN for the verbose biomedical full-text website ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Now they’re not, as I’ve excluded them.

Not that it mattered all that much, as they were being automatically suppressed by Google’s de-duplication and results ranking. In some cases Google appears to avoid ncbi.nlm.nih.gov altogether in favour of full-text at a better source repository. For instance, search JURN for the URL https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc3566601/ and find a link to the article at NCBI, but search for the same article’s title and Google ranks its MIT repository location as the first result — and ignores NCBI because it’s deemed a duplicate of the more worthy MIT.

Nope, you can’t go there…

21 Thursday Sep 2017

Posted by in Ooops!

≈ Leave a comment

The Firefox Web browser’s ever-increasing security nannying is starting to become very annoying. It’s now currently refusing any connection whatsoever to Google Scholar…

No option to say “sod off and let me continue, you stupid bot.” This has happened too many times, recently, with other mainstream sites.

Firefox has an ‘abandon or keep’ fork-point coming up with version 57, when it will start point-blank refusing to run add-ons it deems ‘insecure’. With their officious nannying the makers of Firefox are risking an exodus to the Opera or some other browser, it seems to me. Security I control and can turn off is one thing, but handing it over to some always-on dumb-bot is quite another.

Zazzled

10 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by in Ooops!

≈ Leave a comment

It appears that Bing Images is including paid-for? Zazzle ad-results in Image Search results, and refusing access to all results if one tries to remove the offending Zazzle crapware with a -zazzle search operator…

Search Bing Images for: “postcard” “stoke-on-trent” “realphoto” …

The Zazzle ad-results are the two naff pictures with brightly coloured hearts.

Search Bing Images for: “postcard” “stoke-on-trent” “realphoto” -zazzle …

Scrapus

04 Sunday Jun 2017

Posted by in Ooops!, Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

Ryan Regier asks “What is going on with the number of Open Access Journals indexed in Elsevier’s Scopus?”…

“… it looks like Scopus added around 400 open access journals after January 2016, then another 270 after January 2017, and finally removed around 1,000 after February 1st, 2017. Removing around 1,000 open access journals is big deal. That’s almost a quarter of all the open access journals Scopus has in their collection…”

Concludes after some investigations that…

“… Scopus over-reported and mislead its customers about how many open access journals they indexed.”

I can add, from a previous post here on the JURN blog, that…

“Scopus had 60 OA arts & humanities titles in English at June 2015, a fact discoverable via their new OA tagging [in their summer 2015 master spreadsheet]. Though, after sorting, that Scopus category also included such ‘tres arty’ titles as Canadian Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, Journal of Biomedical Discovery and Collaboration and Asian Social Science.”