05 Tuesday May 2020
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
Google Research has launched COVID-19 Research Explorer. This has “a semantic search interface” that enables better search and discovery across “more than 50,000 journal articles and preprints”.
01 Friday May 2020
Posted in Spotted in the news
“SaveDotOrg campaign succeeds, as ICANN rejects .ORG sale”. Excellent news for .org site owners. A sale could have led to a scenario in which a new owner would have been able to loot and pillage .org, by drastically hiking up everyone’s registration fees. That’s off the cards for the moment, but The Internet Society still wants to find a new “faithful owner” in due course. One who can offer “protection against censorship and financial exploitation” for .org sites.
30 Thursday Apr 2020
Posted in Spotted in the news
The UK government has just announced that “Plans to scrap VAT on e-publications have been fast-tracked, and will come into force tomorrow”. VAT is the UK’s main sales tax. This should mean cheaper lockdown e-reading and research — so long as publishers and Amazon don’t just keep prices the same and pocket the 20% as extra profit. The move covers “e-books, e-newspapers, e-magazines and academic e-journals”, but seemingly not audiobooks. The change will be permanent, and had been scheduled for December 2020.
The UK government will also spend £35 million in taking out ‘public education’ print ads in newspapers, over the next three months. This will be “split between local, regional and national print media”, with what appears to be a strong tilt toward what the government calls the “most-trusted” print newspapers. This may imply that the shoddy, slipshod and alarmist reporting we’ve seen could be about to have financial consequences for newspapers.
21 Tuesday Apr 2020
Martin Paul Eve has a new post on Zotero and auto-downloading open access books…
all I really wanted was to be able to embed an ISBN and a citation_pdf_url and have Zotero do the lookup and save the file. However, out of the box there is no easy way to do this.
His test book is quite interesting, his own new Close Reading with Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (April 2020), which applies textual computing to the science-fiction-philosophy novel Cloud Atlas.
I don’t know about or use the current version of Zotero, so I’m unsure what advantages it confers. I assume Eve intended to find a way to automatically harvest all CC-SA books in PDF, and build a local collection for automated analysis.
But I see his book is already on the OA book aggregator catalogue OAPEN. Theoretically then, since OAPEN is comprehensive and timely, one could have a harvester look at all the pages hanging off library.oapen.org/handle/ and save out only those pages with the required permissive CC “Rights” label on them. These pages each have a uniform PDF link URL in their HTML, in the form of library.oapen.org/bitstream/ and these could be easily extracted to a list. One would end up with a set of PDF links for a linkbot, ready to download to a local folder for computational analysis. I presume that’s what Eve intended to have Zotero do.
One would need to reference the OAPEN record page first, in the way I’ve suggested, since the PDF itself can have different or non-uniform or contradictory licence information. For instance in its interior Eve’s book is labelled as both “©” … “No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.” and also “Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0”.
How many items on OAPEN have a creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/ “Rights” label at present, as Martin’s book does? A Google site: search suggests around 650 titles. Half an hour of my filtering the OAPEN CSV suggests it’s actually just over 3,000 under some form of permissive CC that permits commercial use. That’s still a manageable harvest at present. But as the supply of OA books and monographs grows rapidly, the likely result of various OA mandates in the near-future, it might be a useful time-saver for text-miners and digital humanists if OAPEN were to maintain a single torrent of all the PDFs. Inside which a half dozen folders would neatly organise the books by CC licence type. Such a one-click solution might save a lot of faffing around with digging into and filtering their XML and CSV feeds, wrangling with harvester scripts and timeouts, or trying to wrestle with third-party services such as Zotero. A torrent could also save OAPEN’s bandwidth.
08 Wednesday Apr 2020
Posted in Ooops!, Spotted in the news
“On the Persistence of Persistent Identifiers of the Scholarly Web” is a new paper from Los Alamos, finding that many DOIs in a 10,000 random sample are unreachable…
“consistently across request methods, more than half of our DOIs fail to successfully resolve to a target resource”
Despite the misleading “2004” tag on the page identifier tag, the paper was actually presented in March 2020 at the CNI Spring 2020 Project Briefings.
06 Monday Apr 2020
Posted in Spotted in the news
The Association for Computing Machinery’s substantial ACM Digital Library is now free until the end of June 2020. Includes magazine and journals. A test shows that the most recent issues of these are included. There doesn’t appear to be a log-on requirement, they’re just all free to visitors. There’s also a handy unified search-box…
Open Access discovery wranglers may find the ACM workflow handbook Data Cleaning (July 2019) of special interest.
05 Sunday Apr 2020
Posted in Spotted in the news
A new survey “Attitudes of North American Academics toward Open Access Scholarly Journals”. A questionnaire was sent to 15,000 in the U.S. and Canada, both faculty and grad students, with 2,121 responses. The results indicated a high level of antipathy toward open access in the Arts & Humanities. Rather more surprisingly, it was about the same in Social Studies…
05 Sunday Apr 2020
Posted in Spotted in the news
A newly updated UserScript Search All Free Image [JPG+PNG+ICO]. It can be forked, and thus could be a quickstart for someone to re-target the script from stock/clipart/icons to CC0 pictures at museums.
04 Saturday Apr 2020
Posted in Spotted in the news
Crafts magazine is now offering free access to its 50-year online archives. The magazine covers high-quality museum-level crafts and their makers, of all types. The archive can also be searched by keyword, and the Australian site seems fairly speedy at present when accessed from the UK.
02 Thursday Apr 2020
Posted in Spotted in the news
The Library Journal now offers temporary free access. This is via public generic log-on details, so no email registration is needed. The log-on may appear to hang and not complete. But on leaving it for a minute I found, on then clicking away, that I had been logged in. I experienced a lot of time-outs, so the site may be experiencing heavy traffic.