12 Saturday Oct 2013
Posted in Spotted in the news
BeeLine Reader is a simple extension for Web browsers, that uses colour gradients to guide your eyes from the end of one line to the beginning of the next.
It sits as an icon up on your Google Chrome toolbar, and clicking the icon gives you a clean Instapaper-like version of a long-form article or blog post, which is then overlaid with colour gradients along each line. The aim is to speed up speed-reading and skim-reading, while still enabling you to keep focus.
04 Friday Oct 2013
Posted in Economics of Open Access, Spotted in the news
JSTOR is selling subscriptions to businesses and members of the general public. The fee “ranges from $19.50 for a monthly to $199.” Though it doesn’t look like a good deal at all. No access to articles published in the past three to five years. Users can only download 10 articles a month (120 a year max.). And access is only to 1,500 of JSTOR’s journals. Although I guess it might be useful for someone like a independent historian with a book contract, or perhaps an art auction house.
04 Friday Oct 2013
Posted in Spotted in the news
In the news: The Economist on dodgy Chinese research papers and The Independent on fraudulent faux open access journals.
21 Saturday Sep 2013
Posted in JURN's Google watch, Spotted in the news
Google has obviously demoted Google Scholar over the last year or so, as well as loosening the content-inclusion parameters. Max Kemman now asks: will Google close down Google Scholar? The article notes that…
“cited by” and “related articles” functionalities in Google Scholar […] are already available in [the main Google] Search
If he’s correct, there may be another reason for it. Have people in Google taken a good look at the slow-but-sure progress of Microsoft Academic Search, and found they don’t like what they see? Is Google wary of waking up one day to find that the Microsoft tortoise has once again executed its traditional killer slow-mo back-flip karate on a competitor hare?
20 Friday Sep 2013
Posted in Spotted in the news
New paper on arXiv.org, “Just Google It – Digital Research Practices of Humanities Scholars”
“three hundred (N= 288) humanities scholars in the Netherlands and Belgium … General search systems such as Google and JSTOR are predominant, while large-scale collections such as Europeana [a repository of digitised versions of “Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage”] are rarely consulted. Searching with keywords is the dominant search strategy and advanced search options are rarely used. When comparing novice and more experienced searchers, the first tend to have a more narrow selection of search engines, and mostly use keywords.”
18 Wednesday Sep 2013
Posted in Spotted in the news
A new Twitter keyword search-engine, www.topsy.com. Pretty good at helping you find a useful little egg, amid the vast guano-splattered nest of useless fluff that is Twitter. Sadly you can’t pluck out an RSS feed for a regular search, at least in the free version.
16 Monday Sep 2013
Posted in Spotted in the news
Well, that’s one way to keep university presses alive, start to merge them with the government. $12m Aus. will fund…
“a consortium of government and university presses in Australia.”
05 Monday Aug 2013
Posted in Economics of Open Access, Spotted in the news
University of California starts mandatory open access on 1st November…
“The University of California [has] introduced an Open Access Policy [which] grants the UC a license to its faculty’s work by default, and requires them to provide the UC with copy of their peer-reviewed papers on the paper’s publication date. The UC then posts the paper online to eScholarship, its open access publishing site, where the paper will be available to anyone, free of charge. […] On November 1, faculty will be automatically enrolled in the UC’s open access policy.”
31 Wednesday Jul 2013
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
The Gigablast search-engine has open sourced its search-engine code and technology at GutHub…
“An open source web and enterprise search engine for Linux on Intel/AMD. Currently in use on Gigablast.com. A robust, scalable search solution in 100% custom C/C++ that has
been in development and used commercially since 2000. Distributed web crawler. Supports any document conversion plugin to convert PDF, etc. to HTML”
Code currently lacking, though, any “Boolean query support”. That probably doesn’t matter, though, since only a miniscule fraction of seachers actually use Boolean.
27 Saturday Jul 2013
Posted in Spotted in the news
Bing Images has added a new “License” drop-down menu item, allowing a modified search for public domain and Creative Commons images. UK users won’t see it, unless you tell Bing you’re located in the USA, via the settings. I’m in the UK, and Bing accepted my country change without query, and without having to “sign in”.
A test search for “Lovecraft” then showed that the straight Public Domain filter is useful with the right keywords, but that the other CC search modifiers give deeply misleading results. Even the Public Domain filter can be misleading. For instance, a simple search for “monster” brought up the logo for the KISS rock band, screenshots of Monster High and Sesame Street, and Japanese anime.