• Directory
  • FAQ: about JURN
  • Group tests
  • Guide to academic search
  • JURN’s donationware
  • openEco: nature titles indexed

News from JURN

~ search tool for open access content

News from JURN

Monthly Archives: June 2009

Firefox 3.5 – how to turn off Google Suggest

30 Tuesday Jun 2009

Posted by David Haden in JURN tips and tricks

≈ 2 Comments

The horrible Google Suggest feature (now even worse because it’s started including “Sponsored links in suggestions”) returns in the long-awaited Firefox 3.5 final, now available for download. That’s because the FF Blocksite addon, previously so useful for rooting out Google Suggest, does not work in 3.5.

Search veterans who want to turn off Google Suggest should instead use the Adblock Plus addon. In Options / My Adblocking Rules, simply block the domain…

clients1.google.com

This is the server that handles Google’s suggestion keywords. Treating it as adware — which indeed it has now become — turns off Suggest.

Spybot, version .007

30 Tuesday Jun 2009

Posted by David Haden in Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

Uh oh, the future of open intelligence analysis will be in the hands of bots? Somehow, that doesn’t sound reassuring. DARPA (U.S. defence research) is reportedly to spend $30 million on a bot that can digest the web, and automatically churn out potted reports and data-sets for humans.

Still, it’s said there might be civilian spin-offs…

“However, BBN also expects the program to enable a plethora of new civilian applications, everything from intelligent bots to personal tutors. The system could provide unprecedented access and automated analysis of the world’s libraries, allowing for vastly expanded cultural awareness and historical research”

If you’d like to have your own mini intelligence agency on your desktop, the free Maltego 2.0 application is fun to play with, although oddly lacking in a basic means of identifying which website is hosted in which nation.

An interview with your browser

28 Sunday Jun 2009

Posted by David Haden in How to improve academic search, My general observations

≈ 1 Comment

With the release of the supposedly whippet-fast Firefox 3.5 just two days away, I’m wondering why browsers don’t do a short ‘search profile interview’ when they install. Rather like online dating ‘interviews’, I suppose, but with Google as the object of your affection rather than a Gordon/Gloria.

Then, on certain types of searches (i.e.: the vague ones) your browser would ping Google your carefully-considered ‘search profile’, and presto! — better search-results.

For example, an art historian doing a vague search for samuel palmer shoreham would never have to see results from dodgy poster websites, because the browser profile would say “my user is interested in art history and books and articles containing references”, and Google might also say “samuel palmer was a notable artist whose work is out-of-copyright”, and thus the modifiers -posters -framing -delivery would automatically be added to such a search, and pages with proper academic references would get a boost in the results.

Whereas the person whose browser profile said “frequently spends on home furnishings, subscribes to Homes & Gardens” will get the poster and prints websites pushed to the top, and the 50,000-word thesis on Christian visionary symbolism pushed to the bottom.

Yes, you could have removed those results manually (*) if you’re logged into Google, but you can only do that after the search. And most ‘vague’ searches will happen on searches that don’t tend to repeat themselves often.

( * I had about four poster-sales site in the first two pages of that search, yet I’m logged into Google and have been searching for academic stuff for months — Google seems to have learned little about what I want)

Privacy issues? Well, yes. But what if the browser could seamlessly re-configure a users’s vague search terms, based on their personal profile and known interests, before the query is sent to the engine? Think “search suggestions” on steroids, and without any annoyingly dumb flickery drop-down boxes that don’t have a clue about my interests.

‘Will you be paying in lambs or silver?’

27 Saturday Jun 2009

Posted by David Haden in Economics of Open Access

≈ Leave a comment

Free access to content from over 3,000 arts and humanities journals not enough? There will still be times, of course, that call for a flourish of the cheque-book or a PayPal ping. Steven Schroeder wanted to spend some money on journal subscriptions…

“You know, for all the moaning journals (mostly university-affiliated) do about how they won’t ever get subscribers, a surprising number of them aren’t making it easy to get subscriptions. I had a little money burning a hole in my pocket yesterday and decided to buy some new subscriptions — my only condition was that I be able to buy them online. […] You might as well be asking [potential subscribers] to chip their request on a stone tablet or send it via Pony Express. By my rough estimate, maybe 20% of university-affiliated journals have the ability to purchase online through their websites.”

Open Monograph Press launches 8th–10th July

26 Friday Jun 2009

Posted by David Haden in Open Access publishing, Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

The non-profit behind the Open Journal System is about to launch a version for monographs, called the Open Monograph Press (OMP). (Background and PDFs).

Google’s numrange modifier

26 Friday Jun 2009

Posted by David Haden in JURN tips and tricks

≈ Leave a comment

Here’s a potentially useful search tip for JURN users. Whereas Google’s numrange search modifer doesn’t work with Google Scholar, it does work with JURN. So, for instance…

Mercia Wulfhere 600..700

…will get you articles and book chapters about Wulfhere of Mercia, filtering for pages where the text contains any date between the years 600 and 700 A.D.

UK’s Share of World Research Output

26 Friday Jun 2009

Posted by David Haden in Official and think-tank reports

≈ Leave a comment

Yet another new (June 2009) Research Information Network research report, The UK’s Share of World Research Output : an investigation of different data sources and time trends (PDF link)…

“we have noticed that the figures provided in various reports for the UK’s share of the world’s production of scientific publications vary enormously. That a seemingly straightforward figure should show such volatility perplexed us, and so we asked Grant Lewison and colleagues in the CIBER group at University College London to analyse the published figures, and explain the differences between them.”

Swiped

26 Friday Jun 2009

Posted by David Haden in Ooops!

≈ Leave a comment

Ooh, look! A special edition of Wired…

swiped

Heh.

The news item that inspired the faux cover.

The final nail in the coffin of a once-vital magazine.

Basic name authority added to Google News

26 Friday Jun 2009

Posted by David Haden in JURN's Google watch

≈ 2 Comments

Google News has just introduced a new feature to find articles written by someone, rather than about someone…

“If you spot an article by a specific journalist, you can click their name to bring up other articles they’ve written.”

With this and the Google News RSS feed, it’s now possible to set up a simple news feed for new articles from your fave journalists. Possibly in the elegant Firefox addon Feedly. Don’t forget to click “sort by date” before you grab the feed.

And since you can plug RSS feeds into pages, you could now set up a public Daily Something page, cut out the churnalist press-releases and just have a select band of top specialist journalists effectively writing for you. This is really going to annoy the newspaper publishers.

And you can also type a simple search modifier into the Google News search-box, e.g.:

author:”Matthew Parris”

And this can be combined with the source: modifier…

source:Washington_Times

‘It’s a long way to Pasadena’

26 Friday Jun 2009

Posted by David Haden in Ooops!

≈ Leave a comment

Found on a university library blog today…

“As of July 1, 2009 we will no longer subscribe to a link resolver. This means that we will not be able to hook to our holdings through Google Scholar any more. The Google Scholar instructions will be removed from our web site on July 1.”

← Older posts
Subscribe: RSS News Feed.
I'm on Patreon!

JURN:

  • JURN : directory of ejournals
  • JURN : main search-engine
  • JURN : openEco directory
  • JURN : repository search

Related sites:

  • 4 Humanities
  • Academic Freedom Alliance
  • Accuracy in Academia
  • Alliance Defending Freedom
  • ALPSP
  • alt.academy
  • AMIR
  • Anterotesis
  • Arcadia project
  • Art Historicum (German)
  • AWOL
  • Beall's List (updated at 2018)
  • Beall’s List (old)
  • Beyond Search
  • Bibliographic wilderness
  • Booktwo
  • Campus Reform
  • Charleston Advisor
  • Coalition for Networked Information
  • Communia (public domain watchdog)
  • Cost of Knowledge
  • Council of Editors of Learned Journals
  • Dan Cohen
  • Digital Koans
  • Digital Shift
  • Dissernet (Russian anti-plagiarism)
  • DOAJ
  • Don't Block TOR
  • eFoundations
  • EIFL
  • Electronic Frontier Foundation
  • ELO
  • Embargo Watch
  • ePublishing Trust for Development
  • Facebook: Arab Open Access
  • Facebook: Italian Open Access
  • Facebook: Open Access India
  • Film Studies for Free
  • FIRE
  • Flaky Academic Conferences
  • Found History
  • Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
  • Free Speech Union (UK)
  • Google Algorithm
  • Heterodox Academy
  • Iconclass
  • IFLA Serials blog
  • ImpactStory
  • infoDocket
  • InTech Blog
  • Jinfo (formerly Free Pint)
  • Kindle blog
  • L'edition Electronique (French)
  • La Criee : periodiques (French)
  • Leader Statement Database on Free Speech
  • National Association of Scholars
  • National Coalition of Independent Scholars
  • Neil Beagrie
  • OA Lookup : Policies
  • OA Working Group
  • OASPA
  • Online Searcher
  • Open Access Bibliography
  • Open Access Week
  • Open and Shut?
  • Open Electronic Publishing
  • Open Folklore
  • Open Knowledge Maps
  • Open Library of Humanities
  • Periodiques en ligne (French)
  • Peter Murray Rust
  • PKP / OJS
  • Project Gutenberg
  • Publishing Archaeology
  • RBA Blog
  • Reclaim the Net
  • Research Information
  • Research Remix
  • Right to Research
  • River Valley TV
  • ROARS (Italian)
  • Scholarly Electronic Publishing
  • Scholarship Matters
  • Searchblox
  • Searcher
  • Serials Cataloger
  • Serials Review
  • Society of Young Publishers
  • Speech First
  • TaxoDiary (taxonomies news)
  • Taxpayer Access
  • Tentaclii
  • The Scholarly Kitchen
  • Thoughts from Carl Grant
  • Web Scale Discovery
  • Zotero blog

Some of the libraries linking to JURN

  • Boston College Libraries
  • Brooklyn Public Library, NY
  • Duke University
  • Kobe University, Japan
  • Rhode Island College
  • San Jose State University
  • UConn Stamford
  • University of California
  • University of Cambridge (Casimir Lewy Library)
  • University of Cambridge (main)
  • University of Canberra
  • University of Toronto
  • Washington University
  • West Virginia University

Spare BitCoins? Please send donations to JURN via: 17e2KGuyzjzEEE7BsoYTwMo3MtUod6DrjP

Archives

  • January 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • June 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • News from JURN
    • Join 901 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • News from JURN
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar