It seems that JURN’s search results have become even more precise over the last year, if a new report by Searchmetrics is to be believed…

“the study found the URLs for pages that feature in the top 20 search results are about 15% longer on average than in 2015. Searchmetrics said this is likely because Google is better able to identify and display the precise pages that answer the search intention, and these pages are more likely to have longer URLs because they possibly lie buried deeper within websites.”

The launch of Metadata 2020 is reported to have slipped to early 2017. They’re apparently hoping that the big publishers will release all their metadata for open public use, and will flag their open access articles with uniform publicly-discoverable tags. Good luck with that one.

I see there’s a new 2016 study of the DOAJ in New Library World (Vol. 117, 11/12, pages 746-755). The researchers found that in the DOAJ…

“roughly 20-25% of the [journal homepage] URLs redirected to another URL” but that “only 2.11% of 9,073 journals [proved] to be inaccessible”

… once the redirects were followed.

Two automated tests were done (using home-brewed Excel wizardry, rather than dedicated linkbot software) of all 9,073 titles, one month apart, pinging each journal’s homepage. They followed this up with a manual check on all the URLs of the still-inaccessible journals.

The research seems to have been quite thorough, although I’d observe that a homepage URL is far less likely to be broken than the deeper direct article URLs on the DOAJ’s table-of-content pages. Article page / PDF URLs can be easily broken, for instance by the journal moving from WordPress to OJS or visa versa. A similar test might usefully be run on a sample of DOAJ article URLs, although I must say that I haven’t noticed any problem on the DOAJ in that respect.

I see that Bentham Open (aka Bentham Science Publishers, not directly indexed in JURN) provided 67 of the inaccessible titles. For some reason they are still in the DOAJ after the recent purge, but my quick tests on the DOAJ’s Bentham URLs found all those tested to be unresponsive. That was last night, and they were tested again today and again found to be unresponsive. So I’m not too worried about their popping up in JURN results (via the DOAJ indexing) and I presume that the DOAJ will have them out fairly soon for 404-ing.

The huge hi-res maps service of the Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection is now inviting small donations. Their service is free and open, cleanly organised and exposed to the public via search engines. Note that there are several forms to wade through to donate, and it looks like it may be ‘credit cards only’. I think they may do better if they also put a simple and swift PayPal button on the front page.

The African Open Science Platform has just launched as a pilot…

“The Africa-wide initiative will promote the development and coordination of data policies, data training and data infrastructure. The pilot phase, launched today, is supported by the South African Department of Science and Technology (DST), funded by the National Research Foundation (NRF), directed by CODATA, the Committee on Data of the International Council for Science (ICSU) and implemented by the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf).”

AOSP will…

* coordinate initiatives already underway.
* encourage shared investment in infrastructure.
* circulate good ideas and practice.
* develop the capacities of individuals and institutions.
* promote key applications of relevance to Africa.
* be a conduit to international open data.

Evil megacorp Elsevier has launched a new Elsevier Datasearch for finding datasets. As you might expect, a very large proportion of the links lead to pages which ask the visitor to ‘pay Elsevier $39.95 to access this’.

The Publishing Research Consortium has a new report, “Early Career Researchers: the harbingers of change?”…

“there are no recent investigations into the extent to which their behaviours may prove transformational. This qualitative study of ECRs from seven countries, a first report of a longitudinal study, tracks communication and publication behaviour, and attitudes to peer review, collaboration, sharing, open access, social media and emerging impact mechanisms.”

Mostly that seems to be “change” as in, “We have still have a physical library? How quaint and delightfully old-fashioned”.