17 Tuesday Nov 2009
The Global Information Society Watch 2009 Report has been released. It’s a substantial book-length “annual report” on the state of open access to information around the world, complete with chapters about individual nations.
15 Sunday Nov 2009
Posted in Open Access publishing, Spotted in the news
An informed 5,000-word article on open access journals, and the debates swirling around them, in Friday’s Times Higher Educational Supplement. If you don’t know your “green” OA from your “slightly off-mauve” OA, then this is the starter article for you.
07 Saturday Nov 2009
Posted in Academic search, Ooops!, Spotted in the news
Removed OAIster from the guide to free search tools. Manchester Met reports that…
“OAIster … has been taken over by OCLC and absorbed into their WorldCat database. … there is no way to restrict your search to OAIster content and it’s very difficult to pick out OAIster records from the search results … OCLC promise a discrete OAIster interface in January 2010, but until then, I’m afraid that it’s all a bit of a mess.”
07 Saturday Nov 2009
The UK’s RIN announce a new cluster of research initiatives on ejournals…
“A new portfolio of research projects will be focusing on transitions to electronic-only publication, gaps in access, the dynamics of improving access to research papers and the future of scholarly communication.”
02 Monday Nov 2009
Posted in Spotted in the news
Books start to outstrip games on the iPhone, claims a new industry report.
“games were the number one category of apps downloaded on the iPhone every month from August 2008 until August 2009. However, in the last four months, book apps have exceeded the popularity of games apps – with one out of every five new apps launching in October having been a book. In September, games apps were overtaken by book apps for the first time.”
It rather sounds to me like fuzzy data in search of a headline, and the press reports fail to make a clear distinction between sales and ‘launching’. Such statistics may perhaps be an artefact of an over-saturated games market, and a sudden flood of ebooks from a particular set of publishers.
02 Monday Nov 2009
Due for publication in January 2010, the book The Ecology of Academic Journals by Bozena Mierzejewska…
“The book is written against the backdrop of the complete transformation of scholarly communication. It considers the multifaceted nature of academic journals in a systematic investigation of the journal’s eco-system — a metaphor indicating the importance of relationships between all involved stakeholders, their environments and their functioning as a unit. This book develops a framework which can be used for identifying journal’s market position and developing future directions. It draws on authors practical experience as publisher and editor of academic journals combined with an in-depth knowledge of academic research. It is aimed at journal editors, managers and publishers.”
29 Thursday Oct 2009
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
DeepDyve has announced their interesting pay-per-view so-called “rental” model of access to academic papers in… “scientific, technical and medical research”. I’ll be curious to see if it works financially. Looking at the range of journals indexed shows there are small scattering of arts and humanities titles, such as Critical Studies in Media Communication and Feminist Media Studies, although in both cases only articles from 2008 are available.
Annoying, and misleadingly, most DeepDyve articles are flagged as…
…when all you can actually access is a short abstract, rather than the full-text article.
29 Thursday Oct 2009
Posted in Spotted in the news
It’s always good to hear of a new art history ejournal. The University of Glasgow has announced the open access Journal of Art Historiography, with the first issue due at the end of December 2009…
“This journal exists to support and promote the study of the history of art historical writing […] encourage the full range of enquiry that encompassed the visual arts in its broadest sense as well as topics now falling within archaeology, anthropology, ethnography and other specialist disciplines and approaches”
29 Thursday Oct 2009
Posted in Spotted in the news
The New York Times has just launched an intuitive tool for construction of custom RSS feeds, allowing normal users to test keywords, select from a related set of terms, and then to preview the resulting mixed feed before committing to it. If only all large sites offered such a custom feed…
You start with a bare-bones structure, but with that all-important Google-like search box.
A few searches later, you’re mixing and matching your terms, and previewing the results in the right-hand pane.
29 Thursday Oct 2009
Posted in Academic search, Spotted in the news
48 hours after I talked on the JURN blog about the rarity of workshops in advanced search, up pops news of a three-day commercial workshop in Brighton, UK. The university is to open up one of their M.Sc. Information Studies modules to the wider public…
Innovations in Online Information, 16th – 18th November 2009, University of Brighton. £420. “This 3 day course introduces students to some of the latest developments in online information services and technologies including: Advanced Web Searching; Mashing up RSS; Paid vs. Free Content; Searching for Media; Future of Search.”