Category Archives: Spotted in the news

Report: Equitable access to research in a changing world

28 Monday Sep 2020

Posted by in Academic search, Economics of Open Access, Official and think-tank reports, Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

Released in June 2020, a new consultancy report titled “Equitable access to research in a changing world: Research4Life Landscape and Situation Analysis”. This surveys the pressures on the Research4Life aid programmes. Established 20 years ago, Research4Life gives developing countries “free or low-cost” online access to journals and books from some 175 publishers. Along with other aid initiatives, this means that African universities often have better free access to journal databases than do some academics in advanced nations. The new report makes no recommendations, but a key point to note is that…

… some of the most relevant and influential research undertaken in low-and-middle income countries happens outside academia: in specialised research institutes, think tanks, or government-backed research agencies. In some countries, research agencies and institutes conduct research in national priority areas and have direct access to and influence on decision-makers” [yet] “these non-governmental organisations have in the past been excluded from open access debates, and may be unable to take advantage of initiatives such as Research4Life.

It could be useful to quantify that “may”, through further research. Do developing nations find roundabout ways to include their research agencies in Research4Life, such as giving off-campus agency researchers special log-ins to access the national university system? Or are such arrangements rather moot, in the age of open-access and Sci-hub? If not, would there be a real benefit if Research4Life were to be extended to bona fide government research agencies and suitable NGOs? How much would such an expansion actually cost, and what could the returns be in such nations?

Cultural Japan

19 Saturday Sep 2020

Posted by in Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

Launched in August 2020, Cultural Japan. More than a million items on Japanese Culture, in a user-friendly interface.

On searching it becomes apparently that it’s an aggregator. A search for cat for instance, brings in results by Japanese artists and photographers from all over the Anglosphere and Europe, whereas one might have expected it to draw on Japanese digitised collections. Only one result came from Japan, from the University of Tokyo General Library. However, it appears this is simply an artefact of my search. If I search for cat using the Japanese Kanji 猫, then the search results are indeed a mix.

It seems no large versions of pictures are on-site, and the searcher must follow an off-site link and hope for the best, negotiating various links and viewer types to try to get a large version.

In the case of a test picture, “Scouts near Niu-chang on a snowy night”, after about four pass-throughs the largest version at the final landing site was 800px. However, a quick Google Search for the same picture’s title “as a phrase” found a large version via Google Arts & Culture. This was not picked up by Cultural Japan. This is worth remembering if you get to the end of the click-chain and still only have a small picture.

Open and shut

14 Monday Sep 2020

Posted by in Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

It appears that the DOAJ is now accepting journals that are only ‘open’ in the sense that they’re available to institutions and members via JSTOR. e.g. four or five Berghahn Books titles that were listed today.

The Berghahn Books blog has no announcement I can find that these titles are about to go open access, and Google appears to know nothing either. Their only fully OA journal title appears to be Anthropology in Action, added to the DOAJ in May 2018.

Transcribe in Word

09 Wednesday Sep 2020

Posted by in Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

New from Microsoft, a “Transcribe in Word” service. Upload an audio file of less than 200Mb, press play for transcription to begin. The words appear as if being typed into the Office 365 online version of Word (only). What makes it interesting is that it apparently identifies different speakers, and can also work in real-time when at conferences, lectures etc. Users can transcribe five hours per month from their uploaded files.

Microsoft is rather playing “catch up” here, and the market leader is StreamText offering real-time no-lag transcription at 9 cents per minute. Such rapidly advancing tech likely means it’s not a moment in time to be training as a sign-language interpreter for classrooms and large events. Although I guess heavy accents and mumbling professors may still require it.

What to do about DocFetcher?

04 Friday Sep 2020

Posted by in Academic search, JURN tips and tricks, Spotted in the news

≈ 2 Comments

Update: DocFetcher Pro now available and stable at 31st May 2021, with embedded Java, for $40 via Gumroad.

The freeware desktop file-indexer and keyword searcher DocFetcher has been sporked by the Java runtime update, specifically failing to launch due to an error with the JIntellitype64.dll file. The code archive for this file suggests similar problems for others in the past. And the comments at SourceForge suggest other are finding the latest Java (mid July 2020) repeatedly crashes DocFetcher. Apparently it’s also causing problems for several other bits of software.

The fallback is not the official portable version of DocFetcher, sadly, which has the same problem. Nor is falling back to an earlier version of DocFetcher. Nor is the solution to download and install the latest 64-bit Java for Windows again. It appears that the old 32-bit software just doesn’t play nicely with the latest mid-July Java. This is confirmed by a comment buried on SourceForge from the developer…

“A proper bugfix for DocFetcher won’t be available until 2021, so for now downgrading to Java 8u251 is the only workaround”.

But by that time the software will be “DocFetcher Pro” and $50 paid for a perpetual licence. Ah well. Still, that’s good value compared to dtSearch, and is not a subscription like Copernic Desktop. But… $50. So, an alternative freeware option will soon be needed. I took a look…

1) There is Recoll on Windows, which looks like it’s halfway there, but it costs 5 Euros. That’s not viable if you were wanting to distribute a bit of full-text search freeware with the archive of a large defunct technical forum. Still, by 2021 it might have developed further. (Update: the maker has commented, noting it’s GPL and copies may be freely redistributed).

2) The developer of the freeware AnyTXT Searcher has been knocking the rough edges off it and expanding file types, over the last year. But, while it bills itself a “Google Desktop Search Alternative” is still appears not to have any sort of acceptable in-file preview on its search results. The other problem is that its start-up time is extremely slow. Several minutes, rather than seconds. You expect that of behemoths like Photoshop, but not of a little Windows utility. Plus it appears to be “all or nothing”, and there’s no ability to index just a few folders. Uninstalled.

3) Another possible choice is Exselo, said to be very powerful and yet also free desktop search. But… like DocFetcher it’s Java based. Plus, it’s Registerware and “Invites are sent to friends” (register via Facebook?). It’s a system-hog, and it stops working after 14 days if you don’t accept automatic updates. The developers were obviously hoping to sell it on, and lacking a buyer are now pitching it as a trendy “secure chat environment”? Blugh.

4) The old standby Copernic Desktop has become slightly better. The ‘last good’ wholly free version was 2.30 build 30 (no Deskbar feature on Windows 64-bit, PDF manual here). The current 2020 free version still has no .PDF or Word support, but the 10,000 file limit has now been raised to 25,000. It also has a new $15 “knowledge worker” edition, but that just turns out to be a “per-year subscription”. It’s now Registerware, even to just download the Trial. Also requires big .NET Framework downloads, which the 2.3 doesn’t. Thus it’s not feasible as freeware to distribute along with a large forum archive.

5) The old 2010 Multifind would be a good choice, if only it built an initial index and was thus fast. For some, the lack of a requirement to build an index may be a feature not a drawback. Despite its slowness due to a lack of an index, it can find and display text inside files. And it’s genuine old-school Windows freeware and has a tiny footprint. If you wanted to make something to fill the freeware gap that’s looming with the loss of DocFetcher, you might do worse than buy the rights to this and start developing it again.

So it’s back to DocFetcher. One can’t go back beyond DocFetcher 1.1.20, as that was when it started indexing HTML with no body element (e.g. RSS-feed forum-threads archived in XML and re-named .HTML), and anyway that doesn’t fix the problem. So it looks like the only real solution to get DocFetcher working is the downgrade to Java SE Runtime Environment 8u251 (jre-8u251-windows-x64.exe), which is a security risk unlikely to be welcomed by those who just want a free search tool for use with their forum archives. Perhaps what’s needed is to make a truly portable DocFetcher, which never has to call on the Windows system’s Java runtime?

Podcatr – podcast search directory

28 Friday Aug 2020

Posted by in Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

Podcatr.com bills itself as “the podcast directory powered by machine learning”.

It’s new to me. A few tests shows it’s pretty good as a categorisation and discovery tool for podcast shows. Better, in terms of relevance, than the increasingly screwy Listen Notes. The latter has now gone from only allowing four pages of search results before accusing the hapless user of trying to pirate ‘their’ listings, to now allowing no public results at all for either ‘Episodes’ or ‘Podcasts’ — unless you’re logged in…

Podcatr on the other hand is public and it makes a useful choice in how it presents results within the topic categories for shows. The shows are “sorted exclusively by freshness”. Thus rewarding timeliness rather than popularity. This feature seems to work best if you feed Podcatr’s search-box something more specific than a single keyword, e.g. “H.P. Lovecraft” rather than just Lovecraft. In effect it’s a sort of subtle “what’s new” that you might drop in on every few weeks, just to keep in touch with who’s covering a topic. Thus potentially enabling you to back off from the ‘firehose effect’ of taking a daily look at everything new for a keyword at the episode level, in date order, just in case something is missed.