24 Friday Apr 2009
Francke, Helena (2008).
“Telling a different story in Open Access journals?”
Nordic-Baltic Forum for Scientific Communication. Volume 4, Number 2, 2008.
This interesting article explores…
“the possibility that research will be narrated in different ways” in online journals. “The discussion is based on a study of 265 open access journals. An indication that new ways of communicating research may be emerging is identified, although they are so far fairly uncommon.”
17 Friday Apr 2009
Posted in Academic search
A detailed Information World Review article by the well-known Davey Winder, evaluating various academic search options from the point-of-view of a techie/journalist rather than a librarian. It’s a year old now, and seems to ignore the needs of the arts & humanities, but is still a useful everyman overview…
“One point often overlooked by many amateur researchers is that while the searching at IngentaConnect and Google Scholar may well be free, the hits generated often involve payment of some kind to access.”
15 Wednesday Apr 2009
Posted in My general observations
JURN is now out of beta, having added over 1,300 titles since launch two months ago.
14 Tuesday Apr 2009
Posted in JURN blogged
The German ViFaPolBlog weblog blogs JURN.
14 Tuesday Apr 2009
Posted in JURN blogged
AltSearchEngines blogs JURN.
10 Friday Apr 2009
Posted in JURN blogged
The Information Commons in Library West (University of Florida) blogs JURN.
08 Wednesday Apr 2009
Posted in New titles added to JURN
Pattrice Jones has kindly created a variant of the popular Firefox search plugin “Mycroft” , so that the users of the Firefox web browser can search JURN via the Firefox toolbar. The plugin can be had from this page and then just scroll down the A-Z list to “JURN”. It seems to work fine. Thanks, Pattrice!
The icon next to the plugin says that it’s an “OpenSearch standard plugin” — which should mean that it’s also supported by Internet Explorer 7+.
02 Thursday Apr 2009
Posted in Official and think-tank reports
The UK’s Research Information Network / University College London has just published a new report, E-journals: their use, value and impact…
“A lot of money, time and energy is spent on producing journals but we still do not have any practical evidence about how they are actually used. Many surveys have been done in the past on how much researchers welcome online access to journals — but none have demonstrated how users actually behave and use e-journals in practice. Until now, there has been no joined-up, evidence-based study …”
[users] “forsake many of the online facilities provided on the publishers’ platform … they are much more likely to enter via gateway sites [ such as Google ] … Users are by-passing carefully-crafted discovery systems [available from libraries] … ”
[any on-site journal-specific] “…advanced search function is used rarely, and hardly at all by users in the most highly-rated research institutions.”
“Per capita expenditure and use of e-journals is strongly and positively correlated with papers published, numbers of PhD awards, and research grants and contracts income.”
News from JURN 