Quackwatch

Quackwatch has a list of journals and magazines it has spotted publishing uncritical articles on things like the latest eating fads, dubious cures, ‘wonder’ health supplements, or fashionable medical pseudo-science. I’m not surprised to see the ubiquitous Huffington Post make the list.

Capture text from any picture

Project Naptha, a free browser plugin to easily copy text from inside a Web picture. Only works with Google Chrome at present, but…

“Depending on the number of sign-ups, a Firefox version may be released in a few weeks”.

Reportedly works on Web-res pictures and at angles, although I’m guessing that the excellent MS Office OneNote: Insert | Screen Clipping | ‘Copy text’ function might work better on tiny text.

Handy for those occasional screen captured TOCs, journal page scans without OCR, Google Books pages, and also for unfunny cats. Don’t like a LOLcat caption? Just…

“Right-click and you can erase the words from an image, edit the words, or even translate it into a different language”

SciELO development to 2016

Action Lines for the Years 2014-2016 with the Objective of Increasing the Visibility of the SciELO Network Journals and Collections…

“In 2013, the SciELO Network of national journal collections covered 16 countries, 15 in Ibero-America [South and Central America] plus South Africa, which as a whole, index around 1,000 journal titles and publish more than 40,000 articles a year…”

“A priority action line of SciELO is internationalization that, among other strategies, includes the gradual adoption of the English language for the communication of research with the aim of expanding its international visibility. All article texts must have at least the title, abstract and keywords in English. … journals are increasingly adopting English as either their only language of communication of journal content or are using a multilingual format together with Spanish or Portuguese.”

Open-Access Repositories Worldwide, 2005–2012

This new historical survey may interest some: Open-Access Repositories Worldwide, 2005–2012: past growth, current characteristics, and future possibilities…

“This paper reviews the worldwide growth of open-access (OA) repositories, 2005 to 2012, using data collected by the OpenDOAR project. Initial repository development was focused on North America, Western Europe, and Australasia, particularly the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia, followed by Japan. Since 2010, there has been repository growth in East Asia, South America, and Eastern Europe, especially in Taiwan, Brazil, and Poland. During the period, some countries, including France, Italy, and Spain, have maintained steady growth, whereas other countries, notably China and Russia, have experienced limited growth. Globally, repositories are predominantly institutional, multidisciplinary and English-language based. They typically use open-source OAI-compliant software but have immature licensing arrangements. Although the size of repositories is difficult to assess accurately, available data indicate that a small number of large repositories and a large number of small repositories make up the repository landscape.”

I wondered if this also discussed “growth” in terms of “the growth in indexing”. But sadly the article is behind a Wiley paywall (Update: also self-archived). The poor state of repository indexing by Google, and the probable reasons for it, are however addressed in this 2012 paper from the University of Utah: Invisible Institutional Repositories: addressing the low indexing ratios of IRs in Google Scholar.

In Our Time access, outside the UK?

I’m considering adding the vast archive of the BBC Radio’s uniformly excellent In Our Time round-table discussions to JURN. However, I’m unsure if these can be accessed by listeners outside of the UK? Can readers of this blog post a comment, please, if they can listen to and download these programmes from outside the UK?

Sadly the BBC uses an undifferented/gibberish URL structure for its per-programme records. Its record page for its latest show on Tristram Shandy, for instance, is at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0418phf But the index of In Our Time could be indexed in a basic way in JURN, via the URL for the A-Z listing pages: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/in-our-time/archive/*/all (where * is a wildcard)

Group test: “Tristram Shandy” reception

Another group test:

JURN group test: “Tristram Shandy” reception   April 2014. Searching for free full-text scholarly articles, theses or book chapters variously related to the reception of the famous and seminal book Tristram Shandy. Clicked through on possible results, and briefly evaluated.
DOAJ	0	Used ‘Article’ search. 0 from zero results.
JournalTOCS	0	0 from zero results.
Ingenta Connect	0	0 from zero results.
Journal Seek	0	0 from zero results.
Mendeley	0	Searched ‘Articles’ only, then filtered for Open Access articles only — which produced no relevant results. Then removed the OA filter, which gave one possible result of around 15 — but that proved to be ‘404 not found’.
OATD	0	0 from zero results.
OAlib	0	OAlib appeared to be nearly totally bamboozled by the inclusion of ‘reception’, only four results of the first 50 being about Tristram Shandy.
BASE	1	Searched ‘Verbatim’ on ‘Entire Document’. Examined first 50 results.
NDLtd	1	1 of only two results.
Microsoft Academic	1	1 of only one result.
CORE	2	CORE appeared to be totally bamboozled by the inclusion of ‘reception’, so I tried again with just “Tristram Shandy” + set the filter to just English results.
OPENDoar	3	Examined first 50 results.
Digital Commons Network	3	From 10 results. Only one hit was strongly relevant.
Google Search	4	Using unmodified Internet Explorer 11, not signed in to Google. Forced verbatim. Examined first 50 results. Didn’t count Google Books links.
Google Scholar	4	Examined first 50 results. Google Books links not counted. Faux PDF links for hs3esdk.ru and kmvhr3.biz (dubious-looking Project Muse duplicates in Russia, presumably eager to accept your credit card details!) not counted.
JURN	14	Checked first 50 results, not counting articles or chapters that mention the book title in passing.

Overall, all the search engines tested here struggled with this search, though might have done better with additional keywords.

Google Books also struggled somewhat with this test, picking up only three titles with free preview pages. However, it may interest readers to see the full list of titles found by Google Books:

  The Reception of Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey.
  The Critical Reception and Parodies of Tristram Shandy.
  Shandymania (actually a thesis).
  A Culture of Mimicry: Laurence Sterne, His Readers and the Art of Bodysnatching.
  Laurence Sterne in Modernism and Postmodernism.
  The Reception of Laurence Sterne in Europe.
  Labyrinth of Digressions: Tristram Shandy as Perceived and Influenced by Sterne’s Early Imitators.

Compare this with the following additional book titles which were discovered by Amazon UK:

  Adaptations of Laurence Sterne’s Fiction.
  Laurence Sterne in France (Continuum Reception Studies).
  Sterne: The Critical Heritage.
  Yorick and the Critics: Sterne’s Reputation in England, 1760-1868.
  Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel.
  The Plagiarism Allegation in English Literature from Butler to Sterne.

WorldCat was able to pick up two additional book titles to add to the above lists, of six titles found in total:

  * Turning into Sterne: Viktor Shklovskii and literary reception.
  * The Created Self : the reader’s role in eighteenth-century fiction.
  The critical reception and parodies of Tristram Shandy.
  The reception of Tristram Shandy and A sentimental journey in France, 1760-1800.
  Laurence Sterne in France (Continuum Reception Studies).
  Reception of Laurence Sterne in Europe.

So Google Books, Amazon UK, and WorldCat proved a useful trio for quick initial location of likely book titles. With the added advantage that some of the titles found by Google Books and Amazon offer free previews of pages or even whole chapters.

Not all is as it seems, however. The seemingly spot-on The Critical Reception and Parodies of Tristram Shandy (1950) appears to be a ‘ghost’ book, being a database record generated by a long-lost 1950 Masters disseration at Columbia University NYC written by Gloria P. Freeman. So no chance of getting that one cheap on Amazon for $2.

In its first 50 results Summon (limited to: Books | in English | Criticism or History) only managed to pick up three suitable titles: Labyrinth of digressions: Tristram Shandy as perceived and influenced by Sterne’s Early imitators; and Turning into Sterne: Viktor Shklovskii and literary reception; and Laurence Sterne in France (Continuum Reception Studies).

The British Library catalogue could only turn up two books in two results, The reception of Tristram Shandy and A sentimental journey in France, 1760-1800 (in its thesis form), and Turning into Sterne : Viktor Shklovskii and literary reception.

Is Biblioleaks inevitable?

“Is Biblioleaks inevitable?”…

Through a concerted effort, hackers gain access to the databases of six publishers that together control access to the majority of subscription-based biomedical journal articles. This group makes copies of every article from every journal [23.6 million articles in total] and releases them into the public domain. Subsets of articles are mirrored in anonymous peer-to-peer networks, creating a decentralized and multiply-redundant repository… we speculate that a disruptive change is more likely to come from a Biblioleaks scenario — a small number of massive breaches, potentially from outside academia — rather than en masse civil disobedience from within academic communities.

JURN’s big expansion and ‘spring cleaning’ is complete

Ok, I’m calling the recent big expansion and ‘spring cleaning’ of JURN complete. If anyone wishes to publicise this fact, perhaps to their newsletter readers or social networks or blogs, here’s some news blurb…

---

News, 25th April 2014: Jurn search-tool expands in scope

The open access search tool Jurn has just completed a significant expansion, undertaken throughout March/April 2014. Jurn had previously only indexed its core collection of over 4,000 arts and humanities ejournals, all open access or otherwise free. The new Jurn expansion has now added a large intake of business and law, science, biomedical and ecology related open access ejournals. Also new to Jurn are full-text theses at selected academic repositories, with an initial focus on including the bulk of the larger UK research repositories. Jurn has been built by hand, and highly curated, over a period of five years. Jurn is non profit and ad-free.

JURN

Party like it’s 2007…

Google has released all its old Google Street View pictures, so we can travel back in time….

We’ve gathered historical imagery from past Street View collections dating back to 2007 to create this digital time capsule of the world. If you see a clock icon in the upper left-hand portion of a Street View image, click on it and move the slider through time and select a thumbnail to see that same place in previous years or seasons. Now with Street View, you can see a landmark’s growth from the ground up, like the Freedom Tower in New York City or the 2014 World Cup Stadium in Fortaleza, Brazil. This new feature can also serve as a digital timeline of recent history, like the reconstruction after the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Onagawa, Japan. You can even experience different seasons and see what it would be like to cruise Italian roadways in both summer and winter.

Bing Predict

The Bing search engine is now offering predictions…

“… teams within Bing have been experimenting with useful ways that we can harness the power of Bing to model outcomes of events. … Today we are bringing these insights directly to our search results pages. Based on a variety of different signals including search queries and social input from Facebook and Twitter, we are unveiling an experiment we’ve built to give you our prediction of the outcome of a given event.”

The front cover of the latest Smithsonian magazine also heralds the Future Studies meme…