Annotum

05 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by in Open Access publishing, Spotted in the news

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Annotum is now available. First mooted in March 2011, it’s now a new WordPress theme that aims to deliver a….

* simple, robust, easy-to-use authoring system to create and edit scholarly articles

* an editorial review and publishing system that can be used to submit, review, and publish scholarly articles

An open-source, open-process, open-access scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress, built on the Carringon Theme framework. Annotum provides a complete, open-access scholarly journal production system including peer-review, workflow, and advanced editing and formatting features such as structured figures, equations, PubMed and CrossRef reference import, and structured XML input and output compatible with the National Library of Medicine’s Journal Article DTD.

Could be especially useful for university librarians who have journal management foisted on them?

Why name authority was pulled from Google News

05 Thursday Jan 2012

Posted by in JURN's Google watch

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So, now we know why journalist name authority was removed from Google News results. The evil curse of Google+ -ification of search…

“Google+ is the new SEO. Just look at what it’s done to Google News. In the name of highlighting authors, it now pulls in Google+ profiles [from Google’s new competitor to Facebook]. It doesn’t let the author choose, say, her own website as her profile. If she wants a clickable, personal link on Google News, she has to use Google+.”

I have no problem with Google trying to take on Facebook (competition is something which seems to be destined to improve Facebook, a service I intend to stick with). But the Google+ and other distortions of search results are becoming very annoying.

Google Verbatim

01 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by in JURN's Google watch

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A new Google feature you might have missed in the rush to Christmas. Google has a new “Verbatim” option, which bypasses the appallingly dumb second-guessing that gives results that assume “and” is what you meant when you typed “India”, or that “biography” is what you meant when you typed “bibliography”…

With Verbatim turned on, we’ll use the literal words you entered without making improvements such as…

* making automatic spelling corrections

* personalizing your search by using information such as sites you’ve visited before

* including synonyms of your search terms (matching “car” when you search [automotive])

* finding results that match similar terms to those in your query (finding results related to “floral delivery” when you search [flower shops])

* searching for words with the same stem like “running” when you’ve typed [run]

* making some of your terms optional, like “circa” in [the scarecrow circa 1963]

Great though this is to see, it confirms that people who actually want to do proper search are now second-class citizens in the Googlesphere.

University libraries, student research culture, and Google use

01 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by in Academic search, Official and think-tank reports, Spotted in the news

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Published at the end of September 2011, the book College Libraries and Student Culture: What We Now Know (ALA Editions). This from the Inside Higher Ed coverage of the research in the run-up to publication…

“… the Illinois researchers found something they did not expect: students were not very good at using Google. They were basically clueless about the logic underlying how the search engine organizes and displays its results. Consequently, the students did not know how to build a search that would return good sources. (For instance, limiting a search to news articles, or querying specific databases such as Google Book Search or Google Scholar.) Duke and Asher said they were surprised by “the extent to which students appeared to lack even some of the most basic information literacy skills that we assumed they would have mastered in high school.” Even students who were high achievers in high school suffered from these deficiencies, Asher told Inside Higher Ed in an interview.”

Seriously, they were surprised? Surely anyone who teaches undergraduates could have told them this?

Academic tool attracts $4.5m venture capital money

15 Thursday Dec 2011

Posted by in Academic search, My general observations, Spotted in the news

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Aaron Saenz at Singularity Hub has an excellent long analysis of why anyone would want to give Academia.edu an injection of $4.5m of venture funds (which they just did). The payoff seems to be the ability for large research investors to spot leading-edge emerging trends and topics in the crunched statistics. Statistics that can potentially stream out from sites such as Academia.edu, arXiv.org, Mendeley, and ResearchGate. And, as noted here on the JURN blog, Microsoft’s academic search seems to be headed the same social-network-y way, albeit at Microsoft’s usual glacial pace. Google Scholar responded nippily to Microsoft’s changes just a few days later. Such social networking -based data extractions have dangers, of course, in terms of pushing research funding further toward a lurching playground-like game of “follow my leader”. I daresay that process happens informally anyway, at conferences and in forums, but one has to worry about the valuable proto-research that might get trampled underfoot (or quietly whisked off to China) in such tech-accelerated stampedes.

Authors entering the public domain in 2012

14 Wednesday Dec 2011

Posted by in Spotted in the news

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Public Domain Day, 1st January 2012, gets its own website. Including a list of authors whose published work is to enter the public domain on that day, according to the ridiculously elongated “70 year rule”. Noted names include Robert Baden-Powell (Scouting for Boys), James Frazer (The Golden Bough), Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio: a group of tales of Ohio small town life, including the anthologised “Hands”); Hugh Walpole (the Jeremy trilogy, and also two gothic horror novels), and of course James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Not listed at the publicdomainday.org site: the A.J.A. Symons (died 1941) classic The Quest for Corvo would seem to be entering the public domain. Illustrator Sidney Sime also died in 1941, so his classic horror and Dunsany fantasy illustrations may be in the public domain. In the UK, the Welsh rural novelist Ross Jones — once hailed as “a second Thomas Hardy” — died in 1941 and so would seem to be about to enter the public domain.