Sub luv

Excellent article on the success of the subscription model, and the ways it is being refined for online content.

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Deep article linking in PDF-linked search results

This is interesting. My search for Lovecraft / sort-by-date on JURN gave this result on the first page…

It’s from the latest issue of The Fossil, the journal for the historians of the amateur journalism movement, which is served up as a single PDF with many articles in it. What’s interesting from an academic search perspective is how Google has successfully plucked an article from deep inside the PDF, and yet been able to shown it as a discreet link with the correct title. The opening article in this issue also references H.P. Lovecraft, but it’s tangential since that article is a wider one on the United Amateur Press Association. The main Lovecraft article in the issue is indeed David Goudsward’s “A Visit to Haverhill”, although the topic is not indicated in its title. So it seems Google now has the (new?) ability to pluck a relevant article title out of a longer scholarly PDF, and to present its title in search results as if it were a discreet article. A nice addition to JURN’s capabilities, if such results can be served consistently.

Blinklist

Blinklist, a new non-fiction book summary service. I tried the timely Spillover (scientific look at the history and future trajectory of plagues), and got a clear and well structured 4,800 word summary.

The free trial lasts for three days, then it’s $5 a month for a three-month lock-in. I noted:

* You can’t use their save-to-Kindle button, except via the paid version.
* No RSS feed, to alert you to newly added books.
* A moderate amount of dubious bestseller fluff (Jared Diamond, Naomi Klein, Malcolm Gladwell, etc).
* Currently only 40 new books added per month.
* Strong in ‘the latest business buzz’ and popular science books.
* A very noticeable liberal/leftist bias in selection.
* Really ugly line breaks on the text of the website’s catalogue cards.
* No spoken-word versions of the summaries.
* No rider that similarly digests and impartially evaluates all the pertinent criticisms of the book, from the various reviews.

But it’s certainly an interesting business model, and delivers what it promises.

WordPress’s new posting form

Ugh. An utterly foul new dumbed-down posting system, just introduced on all WordPress.com blogs. The only way to avoid it, for now, is to go to your main Dashboard, and select “Add new” from the left-hand sidebar. That takes you to the grown-up version of the posting form.

Removed most of academia.edu

Removed most of http://www.academia.edu from JURN. It has been getting way too spammy for some time now, even with my use of exclusion URLs to remove the bulk of CVs, and it increasingly dominated JURN search results to the detriment of journals. Overall quality also seems to be suffering.

For now, I’m keeping just the academia.edu “Documents in…” thematic collection pages [ via http://www.academia.edu/Documents/in/*_* ] since they don’t clutter/dominate the JURN results.

“The pain in Spain falls mainly on the plain…”

Spain has legally mandated financial compensation to content owners, for online use of even snippets of content. This is an “inalienable” right and applies to every content producer, which appears to effectively void Creative Commons licenses and ‘fair use’ in Spain. Since even if you want to give something away free as Creative Commons, the law won’t allow that: you will always have the “inalienable” right to suddenly demand payment for a CC-licenced work in Spain, any time you choose. It even forbids linking to content without payment, for anything beyond a hyperlink + minimal anchor text. Given the Spanish-speaking world’s outstanding lead in publishing open access academic journals, this seems a rather perverse position for Spain to take.