The Five Stars of Online Journal Articles

David Shotton proposes The Five Stars of Online Journal Articles

“I propose five factors — peer review, open access, enriched content, available datasets and machine-readable metadata — as the Five Stars of Online Journal Articles.”

From a search perspective, I might suggest we need to add another star for “Googlyness”, when all the following factors are present…

* search-engine friendliness (i.e.: make sure the article title shows up as the clickable link in search results, not something like “43w94.taryyt.indd”)

* RSS feeds for linked tables-of-contents

* embedding of the journal title and home URL in each individual PDF or HTML article page (so they can be easily tracked back, after they get casually downloaded to a hard-drive)

JSTOR taking first steps to freedom

The paywalled JSTOR service is set to offer 70 of its 1,400 journals for free, albeit hedged around with restrictions. But…

“if it works out, JSTOR says, it could expand the program to most or nearly all of the database” […] says it has been turning people away from seeing an article 150 million times a year”

The service already offers public-domain articles (before 1923) for free.

Amazon’s new ‘Send to Kindle’

Amazon has made available new Send to Kindle desktop Windows software. It works a lot like Instapaper, but can send any file found via your Windows Explorer.

PDF features in the banner, but I’ve not yet seen how badly it mangles PDFs on conversion. Possibly Amazon may not try to covert at all, but rather just send PDFs ‘as found’? That’s fine for the Kindle Fire tablet, but PDFs are a pain to view on the Kindle ereader.

You also get a ‘Send to Kindle…’ option in all “Print” dialogues, including that of your Web browser.