Category Archives: Spotted in the news

CORE at 9m

14 Thursday Dec 2017

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Updated figures on the full-text stored at CORE, today.

CORE is now stated as locally holding 9m OA items in full-text, with 1.83m of those said to be newly-added full-text OA articles extracted from “Elsevier, Springer, Frontiers and PLoS”. Interestingly, the 9m total is described as being made up of both “full-text articles” and other “research outputs”. As such it would be useful to have a pie-chart of the relative proportions. What proportion of the headline 9m are “research outputs” in a form other than full-text articles, and what types predominate among those “research outputs”?

Update: two weeks later at the end of the December the final figures were tallied, and CORE’s blog announced a total of 10.03m in “full text” for 2018…

VitiSynth

07 Thursday Dec 2017

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VitiSynth is a claimed “open access” database for wine and grape professionals. The site foregrounds recent research, and does an interesting auto-highlighting of industry-specific terms and details in research abstracts…

Also does auto-translation to English of Spanish abstracts etc.

There’s no RSS, though. And the website’s “open access” sub-title is rather misleading. The website is public, but the research being linked to is often pay-walled and there’s no “Open Access research only” filter for results.

Museums magazine, the 2040 issue

04 Monday Dec 2017

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That’s some preprint! The Alliance of American Museums has just published their November/December 2040 issue of Museum magazine. It’s free to all, in PDF. Generally too tame and fearful of snipping at our present-day cat’s-cradle of consensus about the future, I’d say. But I do like the whimsical idea of a future Volcano Adventures Museum…

“recent technological advances in protective heat shield clothing have made it possible for group tours to climb down into the crater of the volcano”

Zoom.ai

04 Monday Dec 2017

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“Zoom.ai trawls the web for information and posts to create an instant personal profile of people you will meet for the first time.”

An interesting development in the “I’m too lazy/dumb to search, have a bot do it for me” Dept. Possibly illegal under EU and UK data protection and data re-matching laws, I’m guessing, but this sort of technology is likely to be an interesting factor in future search, provided it can establish Name Authority with 100% accuracy. Possibly also of future interest to negligence lawyers: “You mean, you relied on a new closed-source algorithm to decide who to invest $1m in / hire / partner with, based on so-called ‘personality profiles’ that were delivered to you just minutes before you entered the meeting?”

Mixnode

29 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by in Academic search, Spotted in the news

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Common Crawl has updated and is now at “3.2 billion Web pages and 260 TiB of uncompressed content”. In September they added a list of university domains to the crawl. This time, for the first time, they’ve actively been trying to blacklist spam-network pages.

The Crawl is also now including 300m+ new URLs from a paid service called Mixnode, which looks like a very interesting on-demand custom-crawling and indexing service…

“Mixnode can breeze through thousands of URLs per second and download gigabytes of data per minute without a hitch.”

Presumably some of this comes via abstracting sections of the Common Crawl, then ‘filling in’ the rest?

Now all Mixnode needs is a half-decent ‘public search’ front-end for a Mixnode crawl, and it’s ‘Build Your Own Search Engine’ time — without the limitations of a Google CSE.

Facebook changes Group picture headers

28 Tuesday Nov 2017

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks, Spotted in the news

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Facebook has changed code and this has affected the size of the picture headers on all Facebook Groups, thus radically messing up people’s headers. For now, a new upload picture size of 820px by 384px will give a Group admin about the right size and proportions, but it’s still not ideal re: spacing and crispness. I’ll update this post when the new correct size is known.

Update: marketeers are suggesting 1920px as the ideal new Group cover picture size, for upload. That’s the new Kindle Fire HD 10″ size, so I’m guessing that’s perhaps why Facebook changed the size on Groups.

oaFindr now called 1Findr

17 Friday Nov 2017

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Nothing about this on Google News, but apparently the universities-only oaFindr has dropped the OA bit of the name and is now called 1Findr…

“1science has decided to change the name of the product line. Market analysis shows that its greatest value is the analysis and the integral access to the content, and to reflect this change, they have changed the prefix “oa” to “1”. So, oaFindr becomes 1Findr; oaFigr becomes 1Figr; and oaFoldr + becomes 1Foldr Data.”

Por un lado, 1science ha decidido cambiar el nombre de línea de productos. Puesto que su mayor valor es el análisis y el acceso integral al contenido, para reflejar este cambio, han cambiado el prefijo “oa” por “1”. Así pues, oaFindr se convierte en 1findr; oaFigr se convierte en 1figr; y oaFoldr + se convierte en 1foldr Data. … proporciona hipervínculos a 30 millones de artículos disponibles en acceso abierto.

Source, SEDEC Bulletin, Nov 2017.

The same source also quotes some current statistics. According to the CEO 1Findr currently … “provides hyperlinks to 30 million articles available in Open Access.” as part of a wider mixed database of records for 85 million. That’s both paywalled and OA academic articles. Apparently dating from the 17th century onwards, interestingly. In comparison, Microsoft Academic’s last known total (late 2016) was 140 million.