JURN is a search-engine indexing free ‘open access’ ejournals in the arts and humanities, along with other arts and scholarly journals offering free content.

How do I use it?   You can use it just like Google. JURN is running on a Google Custom Search; so JURN is speedy, and you can use all the usual Google search modifers, such as intitle:”your phrase” and filetype:pdf   But I assume the typical user will have an adequate grasp of the best ways to search Google, and will thus also have some idea of the exact terms they need to use. For example, a unsophisticated search for…

      Gender Studies Shakespeare

…will only obtain an interesting but very broad overview, while a search such as such as…

      intitle:”The Tempest” gender

… will return much more specific results.

What’s in the mix?   Journal URLs have been sourced from reputable hand-picked ejournal lists, and found via my own searches. Every effort has been made to include only online academic or art-world/literary publications displaying i) clear editorial control and ii) offering at least some free content. See the full list (PDF, 550kb) for all the titles. JURN’s index was initially pump-primed from the hand-picked ejournals list at Intute: Arts & Humanities and also the Directory of Open Access Journals. A further 1900 ejournal URLs were found during four months of additional web searching, mostly by my locating and testing niche ejournal lists. All URLs are checked before being added to the site-index, to prevent duplicates. Added URLs are usually the ones at which Google sees the actual articles — since these URLs are often very different than the main “home-page” URL of a journal.

What’s not in the mix?   Commercial / pay-to-access ejournal holdings (such as Sage, Blackwell, JSTOR, Intellect, etc) are not indexed — use Google Scholar to search those. Unlike some commercial journal aggregation services, JURN does not inflate its arts and humanities index by adding in large numbers of psychology and education studies journals. The paid-for “buffet style” article-banks, such as FindArticles.com and similar, are not indexed. The Flash-heavy websites used by some arts magazines have a hard time being indexed by Google, even if they’re in the mix. Some journals are not yet indexed by Google, even if they’re in the JURN site-index. Some e-journals “hide” the actual articles from Google in various ways (using hard image-scans of journal pages, database-driven dynamic URLs, or through the use of robot.txt files). Journals in languages other than English are not heavily indexed except in French and Spanish (and where they are, it’s usually because they also publish at least some full-text articles in English). JURN aims to cover predominantly English-language journals.

I see book chapters in the results?   These are not pirated. I have added a small number of URLs that bring in PDF “free-sample chapters” offered from scholarly book publishers. University presses and scholarly book publishers indexed in this way are:—

Ashgate Publishing (inc. Gower and Lund Humphries); University of Michigan Press; Baylor University Press; Atlas & Co., New York; Heller Books; University of Pittsburgh Press and University of Pittsburgh Press digital editions; State University of New York Press; University of Kentucky Press; Routledge; Oak Knoll Press; MIT Press; Temple University Press; Princeton University Press; SAGE; United Nations University Press; University of British Columbia Press; Penn State Press; Blackwell; Cambridge University Press; Oxford University Press; Manchester University Press; Harvard University Press; McGraw-Hill; Palgrave; Wiley; Georgetown University Press; Scarecrow Press; I.B. Tauris; and Yale University Press. Plus free person biographies from the dictionaries of national biography for Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the British Isles (just the free online pages from the otherwise-commercial DNB).

File-naming conventions vary, but I have usually managed to use the Google CSE “Exclude” options to exclude most book indexes and dictionaries from these sources.

Why won’t JURN play nicely with my brand of Automatic Citation Sucker software?:   JURN is built on a Google Custom Search engine — half the time you’ll be lucky to see an article title embedded in the search results link. You’ll often have to do some hand-building of references for JURN-sourced articles, and back-tracking to find out what journal it came from (many open journals don’t bother to embed the journal title in the article). The very haphazard nature of open-access ejournal presentation and web archiving means that automatically building references and harvesting metadata is generally tricky (which is why open ejournals are not well indexed by Google Scholar).

My diacritics don’t work!   Try the plain-vanilla version of JURN. They should work in that.

Where did you hide the Google Scholar widgets?:   JURN doesn’t have Google Scholar style “relevance ranking”, “related articles”, “number of times cited”, “recent articles”, or the ability to sort by author or title of a journal, etc. JURN is very far from what a librarian would call optimised. But this can actually be a good thing, since it reduces ‘herd behavior’ and exposes your search to some useful serendipity.

Is this just another hasty Google CSE search-engine that’s been built in three hours, and then been forgotten about?:   I hope not. It’s had four months of intensive work. JURN was launched on 3rd Feb 2009, indexing 950 titles, and the building of the site-index was essentially complete by early March 2009. By early April 2009 JURN came out of beta. By late May 2009 JURN was indexing over 2,800 titles. By early June 2009 JURN was essentially complete, and I announced it as such on the blog. JURN uniquely uses the actual Google-visible article URLs, rather than the basic home-page URLs. For an idea of how JURN indexes only the free articles, see here.

What about link-rot and spam?:   An annual Linkbot-based “404″ hunt is planned, based on the links Directory, to help treat the inevitable link-rot. In June 2009 JURN was subject to a robust seven-pass “hand weeding” process — using the Google CSE “Exclude” tool — uncovering and removing spam pages, blogs, artist directories, and similar unwanted items.

I dislike reading journal articles from my old screen, and yet it costs me a fortune to print them out:   It sounds like you need to print using the excellent page-saving Fineprint, using either ‘booklet’ or ‘two-up’ mode. A cheap b&w laser-printer, used in ‘toner save’ mode, will also save on expensive ink cartridges. You might also experiment with combining PDF articles into a single-PDF personal anthology, and printing it as a POD book using the Lulu service. Alternatively — 1) buy an e-book reader that can handle all types of PDF files and saved HTML pages, or 2) buy a new 24″ flat-panel monitor.

Can I submit my title?:   JURN is not accepting submissions, but will track and add new URLs from trusted sources such as:

   DOAJ,
   NewJour,
   and Intute:   | humanities | arts | media | architecture | languages |

However, you’re welcome to leave a comment and your journal URL on this blog.

Who made / curates JURN?:   JURN is a personal project of Dave Haden, a lecturer for the last eight years at the School of Theoretical and Historical Studies in Art and Design at Birmingham City University in the UK. For the last three years I’ve also worked for the University of Oxford on the Intute project. I am available on a freelance basis to build a Google Custom Search Engine that will solve your specialist academic or business needs, in any area outside of science and medicine. I can also offer practical training talks on open Web search.