Beall’s List of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers, new 2012 Edition.
List of Predatory, Open-Access Publishers
09 Monday Jan 2012
Posted in Economics of Open Access, Spotted in the news
Category Archives: Spotted in the news
A Comparative Study of the Indexing of Open Access Art Journals
07 Saturday Jan 2012
Posted in Academic search, Open Access publishing, Spotted in the news
An interesting new Nov 2011 journal article…
Sian Evans, Hilary Thompson, and Alex Watkins. “Discovering Open Access Art History: A Comparative Study of the Indexing of Open Access Art Journals” (PDF full-text link).
The researchers found 30 art history titles listed in the DOAJ directory. They then looked for the presence of these in Art Full Text, ARTbibliographies Modern, Art & Architecture Complete, and Bibliography of the History of Art / International Bibliography of Art. They found that only 6 of the 30 DOAJ titles were being indexed by these commercial databases. But half the time the actual full-text article was still inaccessible…
“50% of the time [in the commercial databases] there was no indication that the article could be read for free, nor was the full text provided”
By contrast, Google Scholar indexed 15 of the 30 DOAJ art history titles, and provided handy click-through links to full-text articles, albeit at the price of jumbling them in among results from a host of paywalled results drawn from commercial databases, Google Books, and the like.
Of course, JURN indexes all 30 — and the JURN Directory currently links to more than 60 titles in the art history category. Plus journals in museology and heritage conservation, and also the wider collection of history journals.
It was also interesting to read in the article that…
“No study regarding the indexing of open access journals has yet been conducted in the arts”.
Is there really not a single librarian, or even an OA advocate, in the entire world who is or has been interested in such matters?
Sadly, the authors find that…
“the vast majority of open access art scholarship remains undiscoverable for specialists in the field.”
DIY Book Scanner
07 Saturday Jan 2012
Posted in JURN tips and tricks, Spotted in the news
With the seeming demise of the too-long awaited Ion Book Scanner device (now vanished from both Amazon and the Ion website), those seeking to efficiently scan their private libraries might like to look at the DIY Book Scanner website…
It has plans, shopping lists, photos of items needed, and well… just about everything. If you can’t build it yourself, anyone on a decent salary should be able to find the funds to pay a couple of their neighborhood hobbyists to build one for them. It looks transportable, so perhaps a group of academics could pool their cash to get one built, then share the scanner.
Annotum
05 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted in Open Access publishing, Spotted in the news
Annotum is now available. First mooted in March 2011, it’s now a new WordPress theme that aims to deliver a….
* simple, robust, easy-to-use authoring system to create and edit scholarly articles
* an editorial review and publishing system that can be used to submit, review, and publish scholarly articles
An open-source, open-process, open-access scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress, built on the Carringon Theme framework. Annotum provides a complete, open-access scholarly journal production system including peer-review, workflow, and advanced editing and formatting features such as structured figures, equations, PubMed and CrossRef reference import, and structured XML input and output compatible with the National Library of Medicine’s Journal Article DTD.
Could be especially useful for university librarians who have journal management foisted on them?
British Academy event on OA
05 Thursday Jan 2012
Posted in Spotted in the news
A British Academy event in London Open Access: The New Future of Academic Publishing?, on 12th January 2012.
University libraries, student research culture, and Google use
01 Sunday Jan 2012
Published at the end of September 2011, the book College Libraries and Student Culture: What We Now Know (ALA Editions). This from the Inside Higher Ed coverage of the research in the run-up to publication…
“… the Illinois researchers found something they did not expect: students were not very good at using Google. They were basically clueless about the logic underlying how the search engine organizes and displays its results. Consequently, the students did not know how to build a search that would return good sources. (For instance, limiting a search to news articles, or querying specific databases such as Google Book Search or Google Scholar.) Duke and Asher said they were surprised by “the extent to which students appeared to lack even some of the most basic information literacy skills that we assumed they would have mastered in high school.” Even students who were high achievers in high school suffered from these deficiencies, Asher told Inside Higher Ed in an interview.”
Seriously, they were surprised? Surely anyone who teaches undergraduates could have told them this?
Academic tool attracts $4.5m venture capital money
15 Thursday Dec 2011
Aaron Saenz at Singularity Hub has an excellent long analysis of why anyone would want to give Academia.edu an injection of $4.5m of venture funds (which they just did). The payoff seems to be the ability for large research investors to spot leading-edge emerging trends and topics in the crunched statistics. Statistics that can potentially stream out from sites such as Academia.edu, arXiv.org, Mendeley, and ResearchGate. And, as noted here on the JURN blog, Microsoft’s academic search seems to be headed the same social-network-y way, albeit at Microsoft’s usual glacial pace. Google Scholar responded nippily to Microsoft’s changes just a few days later. Such social networking -based data extractions have dangers, of course, in terms of pushing research funding further toward a lurching playground-like game of “follow my leader”. I daresay that process happens informally anyway, at conferences and in forums, but one has to worry about the valuable proto-research that might get trampled underfoot (or quietly whisked off to China) in such tech-accelerated stampedes.
Authors entering the public domain in 2012
14 Wednesday Dec 2011
Posted in Spotted in the news
Public Domain Day, 1st January 2012, gets its own website. Including a list of authors whose published work is to enter the public domain on that day, according to the ridiculously elongated “70 year rule”. Noted names include Robert Baden-Powell (Scouting for Boys), James Frazer (The Golden Bough), Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio: a group of tales of Ohio small town life, including the anthologised “Hands”); Hugh Walpole (the Jeremy trilogy, and also two gothic horror novels), and of course James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Not listed at the publicdomainday.org site: the A.J.A. Symons (died 1941) classic The Quest for Corvo would seem to be entering the public domain. Illustrator Sidney Sime also died in 1941, so his classic horror and Dunsany fantasy illustrations may be in the public domain. In the UK, the Welsh rural novelist Ross Jones — once hailed as “a second Thomas Hardy” — died in 1941 and so would seem to be about to enter the public domain.
hypotheses.org
13 Tuesday Dec 2011
Posted in Spotted in the news
hypotheses.org is a new platform for scholarly blogs written in French. Specialising in the humanities and social studies.
U.S. Vogue launches paywalled archive
11 Sunday Dec 2011
Posted in Spotted in the news
Vogue has launched a new digital archive containing every page of every U.S. edition of Vogue published since the magazine launched in 1892, all indexed and searchable. Sadly it’s aimed at institutions, and a subscription to get behind the paywall costs $1,575 per year. It’s entirely web-based, contains over 425,000 images, 300,000 ads and 100,000 articles, according to the WSJ. No reports as to the color balancing or resolution/size/watermarking of the photo-spread images.