23 Wednesday Dec 2009
“Studies on access: a review” by Philip M. Davis (20th Dec 2009) is a… “review of the empirical literature on access to scholarly information. This review focuses on surveys of authors, article download and citation analysis”. From the conclusion…
“There is a dearth of research on whether free access to the scientific literature is making a difference in non-research contexts, such as in teaching, medical practice, industry and government policy making.”
[ Hat-tip: Open Access News ]
20 Sunday Dec 2009
Posted in Spotted in the news
Christina Likas posts notes from an NSF Workshop on Scholarly Evaluation Metrics…
“gray literature. It was not findable in the past, now it’s more findable than some of the formally published stuff.”
17 Thursday Dec 2009
Posted in Spotted in the news
Gale Reference Reviews has an in-depth review of the DOAJ. In it, Peter Jacso also points out that…
“Strangely, with the exception of Ulrich’s Periodical Directory, none of the subscription-based serials directories offer an option to search for open-access journals.”
17 Thursday Dec 2009
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
Well, I guess it’s official now. The best academic web-curation service is to have funding for record creation and updating completely withdrawn, and will be left to rot…
We regret to inform our users and contributors that JISC has announced that its funding for Intute will be cut with effect from August 2010. […] Our current service level will be maintained until 1 August 2010. After this date, Intute will still be available but with minimal maintenance.
I suppose we should be thankful that there’ll still be a few techies to keep the servers alive.
11 Friday Dec 2009
Posted in Spotted in the news
FORA.tv – Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, a worthwhile one-hour lecture and Q&A with Ken Auletta — who has a new book out, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It. Sadly, the publisher Penguin doesn’t offer free sample chapters, the book is not “limited preview” on Google Books, and Amazon UK doesn’t have a single customer review more than one month after publication — I wonder how much those three facts are hurting pre-Christmas sales? Is this a publisher that’s “doing its job”?
And why is the MP3 download version currently more expensive on Amazon UK than the Audio CD Audiobook version?
09 Wednesday Dec 2009
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
“The Indexing of Scholarly Open Access Business Journals” is an article in the new issue of E-JASL…
“In order for the increasing number of open access business journals to achieve credibility and flourish in the academic and professional environments it is not enough for them to simply be published and freely available on the Internet. Researchers need a means to be able to systematically search across the broad spectrum of business journals, and retrieve the articles in their particular areas of research and study. […] It is vital that open access journals be indexed in open access databases because in North America they are often the only databases available to business professionals working alone or for smaller organizations, and even for many policy makers in government. Furthermore, in developing countries, OA journals and OA indexes may be all that universities can afford.”
08 Tuesday Dec 2009
A new Firefox + Greasemonkey script: Google Scholar H-Index…
“This rough, yet useful, Firefox GreaseMonkey script will enable you to automatically display some of the most known citation indices (h-index, g-index, e-index) for any author queried on Google Scholar. […] The script currently processes just the displayed result page, and, as such, does not currently work for persons having enormous (h or g)-index (h or g > 100).”
I have to admit I’m not entirely sure how such measures work. But I assume that ‘more is better’ in terms of the starting citations needed to take a measurement. So possibly someone will hack it so that it works through 1000 search results, rather than the current 100?
Another new script of interest is Google Scholar Citation Explorer…
“An enhancement for Google Scholar that lets you see which citations a set of papers have in common. Select a group of related papers, even from across searches, and see which papers cite the whole set (or a subset of it).”
07 Monday Dec 2009
Posted in JURN's Google watch, Spotted in the news
There’s a newly released Firefox addon, called Google Custom Search 1.1.2 and made by Kai Londenberg. It creates independently-hosted anonymous Google CSEs, which you can manage and refine from your Google search results / browser. Although it uses the Google API, your engine’s data appears to be stored anonymously on a server in Europe…
“A Google Account is not required anymore, Custom Search Engines can be stored anonymously on quicksear.ch”
Basically, using this addon gives you a seamless melding of the normal Google results format with the major configuration possibilities of a CSE. It’s Google’s SearchWiki on steroids, in an exo-skeleton.
But I don’t see any way to backup your CSE’s XML annotations file of URLs, which means it would be rather risky to invest large amounts of time building a subject-specific CSE this way, rather than using Google’s own interface. Perhaps a backup option will appear once the quicksear.ch site goes live — the addon and service are currently very new, having seemingly been live since September.
There’s no way to upload a “big list ‘o URLs” in the traditional manner, and have them automatically boosted in the CSE’s search rankings. Your CSE is currently a “add one URL at a time” job, as you surf the search results day in and day out. Which perhaps gives your CSE some interesting anti-spam/anti-SEO features, if your CSE is to be used as a mass collaborative anonymous engine (which it apparently can be — tick “accept volunteer contributions” when creating your CSE). And it doesn’t seem to include Google Books results, even when you tell it to include them and boost their rating by 100%.
You currently lose Google’s new “Options…” sidebar, when searching via your quicksear.ch CSE addon (which appears along with the others, in Firefox’s top-right mini search box).
Just like the official Google CSEs, you get cut-and-paste HTML code, which lets others try out your CSE without needing to log in or install anything. I created a new experimental CSE titled JURN collaborative, with permissions for collaborators, but how collaborators contribute to it is currently a mystery.
Update: it seems that to collaborate you would have to share your quicksear.ch password with your collaborators.
07 Monday Dec 2009
This is rather nice, and seems to have been released in the last few days. A new Chinese Language translation add-on for Firefox, where the language of the web page is auto-detected and the translation happens seamlessly within the existing page layout. There’s no messing around with tedious right-clicking, highlighting, hovering over buttons, etc. This is one of the first of many such add-ons, I would hope. Future browsers should have this built in, for all the major languages.
The only problem at present it that it’s rather too seamless. Users need a little visual flag to show when it’s been applied to a page. And perhaps a “toggle” button.
07 Monday Dec 2009
Posted in Spotted in the news
Kyle Grayson summarises his thinking as… “part of an ad hoc working group with colleagues from Newcastle and Durham Universities that has been exploring the future of academic publishing” …
“in the social sciences and humanities, low citation rates and impact factors — even for leading journals — that in part reflect the inability to capture a broad audience within an academic discipline, let alone establish a readership with practitioners and/or the general public” […] “our research findings on the broader trends in media publishing in general, and scholarly publishing in particular, demonstrate that there are problems emerging over the horizon” […] “staying the course” — in terms of content, public interface, and revenue models — will lead to negative outcomes within a decade’s time.”
He suggests certain immediate remedies…
* implementing a dynamic journal website … where content is regularly updated * audio and video recordings of keynote speeches, lectures, interviews, or discussions * on-line book reviews […] invite contributions from the wider readership * blogs run by the editorial team and/or other members at large * alerting potential users of content [with] updates through social networking tools like email, Twitter, Facebook, and RSS feeds
To which I might add things like… * a collaborative subject-specific Custom Search Engine * simple “plain english” summaries of all articles (not the same thing as abstracts) * a curated “overlay” ejournal, linking to free repository content * Amazon pages for all monographs * translate all abstracts into Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish * a concerted campaign to get backlinks to your website * consider purchasing a good $50 template for the journal (it’s not just about the frequency of updating, but about how stylish it feels) * really good photography of the participants
Backlinks are particularly important. For instance, the journal Quaderno which I found yesterday. It’s six full issues of a free academic journal from a reputable university, on interesting aspects of early American history, in a country that’s teeming with re-enactors and amateur historians. Yet, according to Google, it has not a single inbound link — not even from other academic sites. It’s been online since 2004.