OpenCon London 2014, an afternoon conference at Imperial College, London, with video links to a bigger event in the USA. On the topics of open access, open education and open data. Specifically aimed at “student and early career researchers”. Free on 26th November 2014, and tickets are still available.

Disney Patents an Authenticity Search Engine… “based on authenticity metric values for web elements”. With 10,000 paid hard-nosed curators and five years, it might be possible to build something that was worth using. I doubt that it’s possible with bots anymore, or Google would have done it.

A good article on the dubious or outdated (Deseret News etc) journal titles that leak into libraries via the ‘open’ journal mega-bundles from commercial aggregators. “Overwhelmed by Open Access: A Plea to Art and Architecture Librarians and Architecture Faculty”…

You may have encountered th[e] sheer volume of periodicals, including some unfamiliar or questionable titles, as you have navigated the online resources of your academic library (or even mine). Even though we have the best of intentions, librarians are partly to blame for this. In order to provide access to as many periodicals as possible, some of us have added packages of hundreds or even thousands of freely accessible online journals to our holdings so that they will show up in our indexes, our library catalogs, and even our databases via a link resolver…

The BBC’s Radio Times magazine now has its historical listings sections online. Worth having, but it’s all been iPad-ized — so not as good as page scans with the articles, interviews and spot art by illustrators. Not added to JURN, but noted here as it may be useful for some historians and media researchers.

The Chinese have just announced that all their public-funded research will be open access 12 months after publication. Will that mean “open access within China”, or “open access to the world”?

“Learning in an introductory physics MOOC”, an MIT paper…

“In summary, our MOOC produced significant and roughly equal learning for all of the cohorts differentiated along several axes”

So MOOCs work, at least for learning physics. Which is just as well. Since there are few other scalable ways to deliver advanced quality-assured and corruption-free education, for the brightest of the coming 2 billion people who are set to join the middle classes by 2030.

“Most conservation science not available to conservationists” is a new Conservation blogazine article. It riffs on the recent academic paper “Achieving Open Access to Conservation Science” which examined how much…

scientific research published since the year 2000 in 20 conservation science journals is [now] publicly available

They asked how many of those papers had made their way into open repositories. Only 8.68%, it appears.