JURN link-checked and updated

The JURN Directory has been checked using Linkbot, for dead, broken or moved links. 12 journals were removed from the Directory and from the main search index, because either dead or newly paywalled. 20 new journals were added to the search index and Directory today. Another 24 broken / moved URLs have been fixed.

Academic tool attracts $4.5m venture capital money

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

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.

Open Access Journal Publishing in the Arts and Humanities workshop – report

A summary of the Open Access Journal Publishing in the Arts and Humanities workshop, held at the SaS in London on 20th October 2011.

hypotheses.org

hypotheses.org is a new platform for scholarly blogs written in French. Specialising in the humanities and social studies.

U.S. Vogue launches paywalled archive

Vogue has launched a new digital archive containing every page of every U.S. edition of Vogue published since the magazine launched in 1892, all indexed and searchable. Sadly it’s aimed at institutions, and a subscription to get behind the paywall costs $1,575 per year. It’s entirely web-based, contains over 425,000 images, 300,000 ads and 100,000 articles, according to the WSJ. No reports as to the color balancing or resolution/size/watermarking of the photo-spread images.