Or Elsevier

Over 2000 academics have signed an online declaration against using the academic publisher Elsevier.

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Google Web Fonts service

Google Web Fonts, a new Google service. It offers a snippet of code that styles your website with a font. The font streams in over the Web, so your website’s text looks to the same to all visitors. Although, judging by my experience of using a similar system with WordPress.com, it will slow down page loading. An especially nice choice for historians to experiment with might be Old Standard TT font…

  [ Hat-tip: Beautiful Web Type ]

Summly

Summly is an interesting phone app that passed me by in the Christmas rush. It claims to use advanced algorithms to usefully summarise Web texts. Apparently it works best with journalistic press articles, although is still easily confused by dates. The 16 year-old British inventor reportedly has backing from Hong Kong billionaire investor Li Ka Shing.

Altmetrics

Altmetrics: a manifesto…

“scholarship’s three main filters for importance are failing … new forms [now] reflect and transmit [additional forms of] scholarly impact: that dog-eared (but uncited) article that used to live on a shelf now lives in Mendeley, CiteULike, or Zotero — where we can see and count it. That hallway conversation about a recent finding has moved to blogs and social networks — now, we can listen in. The local genomics dataset has moved to an online repository — now, we can track it. This diverse group of activities forms a composite trace of impact far richer than any available before. We call the elements of this trace altmetrics.”

While some of these claims may be true of science and medical, the research suggests the humanities are rather lacking in engagement with new technologies and blogs / social media — beyond standard Web use, sharing Powerpoint slides and using services like Google Docs.

Surfing the Public Domain

The Public Domain Review has a new online leaflet, A Guide to Finding Interesting Public Domain Works Online.

TPB Physibles

The Web’s biggest pirate galleon has just announced a new search category: “Physibles”, a fancy name for digital 3D objects…

“Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.”

Google 3D Warehouse has of course being quietly doing something very similar for some years now. All their models are free (inc. commercial use) too, but legit. They even give you awesome software, Google SketchUp, for free to manipulate and alter the objects.

Dynamic Collections

Oxford’s Dynamic Collections is a forthcoming WordPress plugin that seems to still be in private beta, but which sounds interesting. Basically, it harvests OER [Open Educational Resource] records into WordPress from across a range or sources, but filters them by keyword(s). The results, presumably with a bit of hand tweaking, are quickly-built subject lists of such resources.

My guess would be that one could probably do something similar with repository record feeds: use Excel to sort simple CSV records by the presence of keyword(s), then export only the relevant records as CSV, then load these into Omeka.

Footnotes plugin for WordPress

A nice new footnotes plugin for WordPress. It uses simple square brackets, which must have a number at the start of them. It accepts HTML links inside the brackets. I’d love to see this plugin come as standard with the free WordPress.com -hosted blogs…

To get the smaller font size on the footnotes, paste this CSS into your theme’s styles CSS, probably at the foot of the font section (that worked for me). The plugin doesn’t add this CSS automatically.

U.S. boom in nonprofit startups is coming, says survey of older folks

A recent survey by Civic Ventures concluded that six million of the USA’s 1960s baby boomers seriously intend, upon retirement, to use their experience to develop new non-profit organisations. And these may not look like the creaky old non-profits that we’ve known until now. They’re likely to be seriously Internet-enabled, and reasonably well funded from private sources. So, here’s a question. Some of the effort will be local (saving stray kitty cats, developing local theatres, creating new woodlands, etc) but how could some of it be directed toward open-access scholarly content? Could structured national programmes be developed to stimulate and guide useful scholarly initiatives by retirees, perhaps based on alumni associations and running alongside things like tax breaks and the promotion of legacies left to help fund open access journals and archive digitisation? And how about your local university gives free library and journals access to any retiree who starts a suitable non-profit, and then invites them all to a free annual TED-like networking event just for them?

Wikipedia to be free on Middle Eastern / African mobile phones

Nice one. Mobile phone firm Orange has struck a deal with Wikipedia to make the encyclopaedia available free of data charges to 70 million users across the Middle East and Africa. Various national launches of the service will happen during 2012. The deal is non-exclusive, so Wikipedia can sign similar deals with other phone service providers.