Mind the Watford Gap

01 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by in Academic search, Spotted in the news

≈ 1 Comment

Cameron Neylon has rustled up a useful map of the public libraries in the UK which are set to offer free access to 8,000 commercial paywalled academic ejournals…

journals_via_public_libraries_uk_2014

Very nice if you’re in the leafy Home Counties around London, not so useful for those in the industrial Midlands or the North. Although the use terms (“I can only use accessed information for non-commercial research and private study”) make such business access moot for people such as the cybersecurity boffins of Malvern or the ceramics R&D teams of Stoke-on-Trent.

Oh well, there’s always JURN, now with added business and science goodness.

New study on OA in full-text commercial databases

01 Saturday Mar 2014

Posted by in Spotted in the news

≈ 1 Comment

A 2013 study “Open access journal content found in commercial full-text aggregation databases and journal citation reports”…

“A study was conducted regarding the indexing of [DOAJ listed] open access journals in three large, commercially available full-text aggregation databases [EBSCOhost Academic Search Complete; Gale Onefile; and Proquest 5000 International]”

EBSCOhost Complete was the best of the three, claiming indexing of just over 20% of DOAJ-listed OA journals in full-text. As the author says, the marketing claims/lists on this were taken at face value, and were not verified. Nor was the indexing checked for being up-to-date.

Mind your business

27 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by in Ooops!, Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

Interesting sidelight from the THES, on the new UK trial of public access to 8,000 commercial paywall journals…

the terms of use of the scheme expressly forbid the use of papers accessed through it for “commercial research”.

So perhaps not so useful for business research as had been hoped.

Access is to journals from Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, T&F, through selected public libraries in the more affluent parts of the UK.

Google Scholar citations pages appear in Google Search

24 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by in JURN's Google watch

≈ Leave a comment

I note that Google Scholar’s single author citations pages are now to be found in the main Google Search results…

   site:scholar.google.com/citations

Although it seems that if a prolific or influential author has two or more pages of citations, only the first will show up in Google Search. For example…

   site:scholar.google.com/citations “graham harman”