The new Data Journalism Handbook has just been launched, as a free ebook. It could also be of use as a primer for academic researchers.

Tor developers Arturo Filasto and Jacob Appelbaum have released OONI-probe, an…

“open-source software tool designed to be installed on any PC and run to collect data about local meddling with the computer’s network connections, whether it be website blocking, surveillance or selective bandwidth slowdowns [forced by the service provider]. OONI will allow anyone to run the testing application and share their results publicly.”

Just in case you wanted to tell the world how much your ISP is trying to censor you…

The Hathi Trust has launched its own open ejournal publishing platform, the awkwardly-named jPach.

Interesting article on a year-old search-engine called Attrakt, which is a new one to me. It’s Italian, and its selling point is that it runs on a set of curated CSE’s (Custom Search Engines).

Peer-reviewed journal papers are to be protected from libel actions in the UK. I have visions of dodgy Russian moguls setting up dubious journals in order to attack their rivals…

JSTOR has launched a public beta of the test for its eventual full free access service. Register and Read is billed as an “experimental” service and it gives access to full-text content from 75 publications, limited to three free articles.

From Dan Cohen’s latest blog post…

“I’m convinced that something interesting and important is happening at the confluence of long-form journalism (say, 5,000 words or more) and short-form scholarship (ranging from long blog posts to Kindle Singles geared toward popular audiences). It doesn’t hurt that many journalists writing at this length could very well have been academics in a parallel universe, and vice versa. The prevalence of high-quality writing that is smart and accessible has never been greater.”

Perhaps we need a word for such things? Such chunky and well-researched articles are always likely to be “headliners”, surrounded by smaller articles in a public publication. But as Cohen suggests, they’re increasingly likely to be dis-aggregated from the original publication, after which such a name would not make as much sense. Nevertheless, “headliner article” / “headliners” has a certain naturalness. It also carries with it a faint whiff of the rock star, since a “headliner” at a rock concert is the lead band or artist, and yet it also retains something of the journalistic in it. The rather Alice-like idea of “lining the inside of one’s head” (head-liner) is also implicit in the word, linking naturally with the activity of sitting down for an hour to attentively read a serious 10,000 words or so.