More vaccines madness at OMICS

More vaccine-conspiracy nuttiness has been published by the OMICS Publishing Group, aka OMICS International. Galalae, K. (2016) “Turning Nature against Man: The Role of Pandemics, Vaccines and Genetics in the UN’s Plan to Halt Population Growth. Epidemiology, 2016 6:232. The article claims a total global eugenics conspiracy by the U.N….

“All epidemics and pandemics of the past 30 years are fabrications of the UN system and its partners in crime at the national level for the purpose of lowering births below the magic line of replacement level fertility and, more recently, also for limiting life to an economically acceptable and environmentally sustainable age.”

The last such article got pulled by OMICS after a while (I hear the whining about such things, regrettably, because I take a daily glance at the raw feed for “open access” via Twitter Live) so I guess this article may also be pulled soon. Although it seems to have been up for a month now, judging by the dates on the PDF.

There are no OMICS journals indexed in either the DOAJ or JURN, though it appears that their journals are indexed in JournalTOCs and Google Scholar in substantial numbers, and “Turning Nature against Man” is currently discoverable via Google Scholar.

loons

Lukol.com

Thanks to The Register for pointing out a search-engine that’s new to me, the Russian Lukol.com. Lukol claims to be a wholly anonymous search engine. So how is Lukol different from the non-tracking and privacy measures offered by DuckDuckGo? Lukol claims that…

“When we obtain enhanced results from Google, we tunnel your search query through our proxy servers, without exposing your search data.”

I’ve given it a quick test, and it seems to work fine and supports filetype:pdf. Basically it seems to be Google Search + URL-matched pictures + news down the side. I’m thinking Lukol might be useful for academics who want to search the Google Search index, in-depth and in very complex ways, without triggering anti-robot countermeasures from Google’s bots?

lukol

On the growth rate in OA

Some new figures today on open access growth from the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics blog. Imaginary Journal reports that Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) is now at… “just under 89 million documents”. However a quick filter of BASE, for journal articles in English in OA, shows a figure of only 3.1m. And the vast majority of those are in medicine and science…

3mill

It’s interesting to hear that PubMed has recently made… “a transition in indexing practice (from manual to automatic)”. Hopefully that won’t affect the quality of the intake.

The DOAJ reportedly added “540 journals” this last quarter.

JURN isn’t counted by Imaginary Journal’s tally, but I’ve done a quick count via the ‘Added to JURN’ blog posts. JURN added 133 new journal titles (published in English) to the index in the first quarter of 2016. That would probably be more like 200, if the newly added non-English journals were also being counted on the blog.

Added to JURN

Journal of Humanities in Rehabilitation

+

A new section added to the JURN Directory, “Humanities in health, emotions and food”…

Health, Culture and Society.
Historia, Ciencias, Saude (history of the sciences and health).
Hygiea : An Interdisciplinary Journal on the History of Public Health.
International Journal of Dream Research.
Journal of Humanities in Rehabilitation.
Journal of Near-Death Studies.
Journal of Religion and Health (via Paperity).
Medical Humanities (2000-2005).
Medical Humanities Journal of Boston College.
PsyArt : the online journal for the psychological study of the arts.
Sensoria : mind, brain and culture.
Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine.

European Journal of Humour Research.
Passions in Context (history of passions and emotions). (seems to have been sold, shortly after this post was posted)

Cuizine : The Journal of Canadian Food Cultures.
Digest : A Journal of Foodways and Culture.
Graduate Journal of Food Studies.
Locale : Pacific Journal of Regional Food Studies.