Now on Archive.org in a handy open .torrent form, the Corpus for 45 million OA papers in 46Gb and dated January 2019. Gathered by Semantic Scholar in Computer Science, Neuroscience, and Biomedical. I get the impression that there’s been some bycatch with Semantic Scholar, but it’ll be overwhelmingly in those areas.

Archive.org has also recently placed online a whole bundle of similar bibliographic datasets from disparate sources, with torrents. This seems to be part of their FatCat project, to ingest and preserve all available records and metadata from mainstream scholarly journal publishing. Open snapshots of the resulting combined (and presumably cleaned and aligned) FatCat mega-base are also available, the last one dated 30th January 2019 and under CC0. It weighs in at a modest 80Gb, so have a spare hard-drive ready.

The Japan Times profiles Jim Breen and his 180,000-entry freeware Japanese dictionary…

If it wasn’t for Jim’s data, and I think to a certain extent how helpful he is as a person, we wouldn’t have the plethora of Japanese language learning apps we do,” notes Kim Ahlstrom of Jisho.org. “It’s had a profound impact.”

“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.

The Cleveland Museum of Art has released 34,000 of its public domain works as high-res digital images under CC-0. It’s a clean interface, and my test search for OA + “cats” came down in about 15 seconds and scrolled down easily.

My first test was a tiled zoomable high-res image, and appeared to have no download, with instead a link to “Request a digital file from image services”. Where… “The standard fee for all service requests is $75”. Hmmm… really?

In framed mode, only a part of the tiling system could be had via right-clicking and “save as…”. By switching into full-view I remained in zoomable mode… but could now right-click a large portion of the image, but I still only got a portion. This seems to be standard across the new collection.

While the new collection is welcome, this is definitely not CC-0 image delivery in the open manner of the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the NYPL. The online presentation, though slick, seems to me like an exercise in public obfuscation that is designed to generate $75 digital file enquiries at the Museum’s picture-desk. I guess we will now have to wait for the Wikipedians to de-zoomify from the OpenSeadragon zoomify system and rip the images into WikiMedia, and thus get them into the public domain in a properly re-usable form.

Here’s my contribution to the cause. Jean-Paul Laurens, “A Funeral” c. mid-1870s-early 1880s, as a rip at 3,800 pixels (suitable for magazine print). Laurens had a macabre streak and was known as “the painter of the dead”.

There’s an increasingly infernal ‘makeover mania’ trend, which seeks to radically change perfectly good User Interfaces which people have spent years learning. Rescue your self-hosted WordPress install from that, at least, with the fine new Classic Editor plugin. Works with the latest version of WordPress, and is an official supported WordPress plugin.

You will not get the ‘center’ code on the old UI, which you do on the fancy one. This is replaced by a right-click addon such as ‘Paste email’ which you set to paste…

No need to add the end p tag. Here there are also Italics tags. I’m assuming you want a centred picture-title, in italics to clearly distinguish it from the body text.