MUSE Open is a planned “Open Access (OA) platform for monographs in the humanities and social sciences”, and has just been awarded, a “two-year $938,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop”.

Good news. But now I hope to hear that the other “42,000 books and 650 journals” locked away on MUSE will also be opened up, to the people who paid for their production.

e-manuscripta is a unified portal for finding manuscript material from Swiss libraries and archives. Not just bare records either, but PDFs of scans for public download. It includes over 1,000 maps and plans.

D-PLACE, which stands for ‘Database of Places, Language, Culture, and Environment’. Just launched, with records for 1,400 societies. My test search for ‘Dance’ in ‘Northern Europe’ gave three results, for Icelanders, the Irish and the Sami.

Retraction Watch needs a part-time editor. Sadly there’s no pay, but lots of kudos.

The increasingly excellent Retraction Watch now has a spin-off, Embargo Watch. At present Embargo Watch seems to be mostly about tracking naughty media organisations which prematurely break embargoes on the reporting of new scientific papers.

There’s also a recent mention of press officers who refuse to write up new papers that have no embargo. I guess maybe the officers rightly think that any daily editor they send the story to will frown and say: “Old news. It was covered yesterday, elsewhere. Next story…”. Hence their work will have been wasted.

I don’t see Embargo Watch doing any tracking of advocacy groups — groups that use a press release about embargoed science to spin their alarmist news agenda across the media and blogosphere, days or even weeks weeks before the paper’s release, while avoiding awkward scrutiny of the actual paper. That sort of coverage in Embargo Watch, and perhaps even before/after comparisons, would also be welcome.

Bing now offers date-limited searches in the UK. 24hrs, week, month. The USA version of Bing has had this for a long time, but — according to the latest PC Pro magazine — it’s a new feature here in the UK.

Sauropod Vertebra points to a 2013 paper today, “arXiv e-prints and the journal of record: An analysis of roles and relationships”. It seems to indicate that not all articles in certain fields are free on arXiv, as is popularly imagined. Much may be slipping through the sieve, even in fields professing to adore arXiv…

“Even in mathematics, the field that is most committed to arXiv, only a feeble 21.5% of published papers are also available on arXiv! In physics, it’s 20%, and ‘Earth and Space’ it’s a smidge under 12%. For everything else, it’s virtually nothing.”

Nor is everything on ArXiv reaching the Web of Science, it seems. I did a quick search and found a long abstract of another paper by the same research team, “On the scientific impact of ArXiv: A case study of astrophysics”. Using a large 1990 to 2012 trawl of arXiv, they found that…

“slightly less than 50% of arXiv submissions [on astrophysics] were also found in WoS [Web of Science]”

Admittedly, a March 2012 sample is now four years out-of-date, and things may have changed since.

Those who can do RSS have long been able to wrangle .MP3 audio of The Long Now’s series of Seminars About Long-term Thinking, without having to install iTunes. Now the video versions of the SALT talks are available to all to view — with a donation merely ‘invited’ and only the video file download and HD versions kept back for Long Now members.

These are long talks, not short TED-like skits. So there are a few SALT talks one might want to avoid, mostly because the speakers thought they could just trot out their usual spiel — Tim O’Reilly waffling and riffing on, as if he were at just another trade show. Anne Neuberger making a creaky attempt to sell the NSA to the Long Now crowd. But 95% of the talks are excellent.

The highlights of the SALT series, in my view, are:

* Stephen Pyne: Ecological wildfire (2016)
* Neil Gaiman: How stories last (2015)
* Stewart Brand, Paul Saffo: Pace Layers thinking (2015)
* Jesse Ausubel: Nature is rebounding (2015)
* Brian Eno, Danny Hillis: The Long Now, now (2014)
* Stefan Kroepelin: Civilization’s mysterious desert cradle – rediscovering the deep Sahara (2014)
* Stewart Brand: Reviving extinct species (2013)
* Steven Pinker: The decline of violence (2012)
* Matt Ridley: Deep optimism (2011)
* Rachel Sussman: The world’s oldest living organisms (2010)
* Peter Diamandis: Long-term X-Prizes (2008)
* Freeman Dyson and family: The difficulty of looking far ahead (2005)
* Brian Eno: The Long Now (2003. Poor audio, I seem to remember)

The website is obviously straining under the load, as the news of the free videos percolates through social media. Which, I suspect, means the above links may be unresponsive until the Twittergasm is over.