• 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: December 2014

A-Z of Egyptology Books and Articles in PDF

28 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by David Haden in Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

An A-Z of Egyptology Books and Articles in PDF, with the URLs freshly collected and checked by the University of Memphis. In progress since December 2013 it seems, and now becoming more substantial. It’s only linking to free PDFs…

Sites which require institutional access or a password are not included — thus journals on JSTOR have not been indexed. Nor have papers available on http://www.academia.edu or http://www.ifao.egnet.net/bifao/ (BIFAO) been included here.”

Geeks and Greeks

28 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by David Haden in Ooops!

≈ Leave a comment

We’re still some way away from seeing the Googlebot AI take over the planet with its ninja semantic skills, I think…

googlsearchsematics

BePress.com begone (mostly)

28 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by David Haden in New titles added to JURN

≈ Leave a comment

I’ve reigned in the BePress.com (Digital Commons Network) pages in JURN search results, by limiting BePress.com results only to URLs containing both ‘subject_facet’ and ‘discipline’…

http://network.bepress.com/explore/*/?facet=subject_facet*facet=discipline*

Intellectual lights

28 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by David Haden in My general observations, Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

Where “150,000 European and American intellectuals were born and died over the span of the last two millennia”, mapped onto the USA. New England and New York light up as if struck by blazing comets from the Old World. Then there’s a great vaulting across the American heartlands and over to the West Coast, where they are impacted by comets of brilliance coming in from Asia. See the map animated over time, here.

usintellectualimmigration

Humanities World Report 2015

27 Saturday Dec 2014

Posted by David Haden in Official and think-tank reports, Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

The new book-length Humanities World Report 2015 is now available for download in Kindle or PDF…

“The first of its kind, this ‘Report’ gives an overview of the humanities worldwide. Published as an Open Access title and based on an extensive literature review and enlightening interviews conducted with 90 humanities scholars across 40 countries, the book offers a first step in attempting to assess the state of the humanities globally.”

hum2015

Some nicely pithy comments from interviewees throughout, drawn from interviews undertaken since 2011. But, rather oddly, a quick search of the body of the book for the phrase “open access” reveals not a single mention.

I had some fun boiling the report’s recommendations down to:


* Truth | [attempt to] reinstate confidence in the humanities as truth finding disciplines [and convey that] we do generate answers, as well as questions.

* Experience | position the humanities as the guardian of human diversity, [a] unique repository of knowledge and insight into the rich diversity of the human experience, past and present.

* Impact | [encourage] support systems for effective[ly and meaningfully conveying one’s work to wider audiences than just peers and students. Add] incentives to encourage more academics to engage in [this].

* Digital bridges | digital humanities experts [should] start the process of bridge-building [with those who either fear or don’t see the potential of digital humanities]. [We should also gently push supervisors for better] training [of] the next generation of humanists [enabling them to] exploit the potential of digital technologies and methods.

* Interdisciplinary (when it works) | not all research requires [a strong] quest for interdisciplinarity [and so it] should not be treated as an end in itself [by funders]. [We should be more aware of the contexts where] interdisciplinary [research] does have considerable [demonstrable] value [and learn how to break down] significant institutional barriers [to unlock that value]. [University] promotion criteria should be reformed so as to give due weight to interdisciplinary research [thus making it less] risky in terms of publication and career advancement.

* Integrity | increased scrutiny of [large funding programmes] to see how well they maintain academic freedom alongside [their role in government] decision-making [and validation of completed government schemes].

* Exploration | humanists should not typically be expected to answer the [“what use is this apparently useless research?”] question.

* Nomadics | there is a crying need for experiment over and above the traditional university and its disciplinary divides.

* Expeditions | [we need major new long-term] integrative platforms as spaces for networking, capacity building and preparation of research on questions [which aid the] understanding [of] the human condition. [These would go far beyond the existing traditional advanced] centres and institutes, visiting fellowships and stakeholder interaction [initiatives]. They might identify [what we don’t know] and what we might know [if the funding and will and focus were enough to] lower the barriers between the human, the social and the natural sciences, [and if researchers were allowed to pay no] regard to national priorities.


On that last point, the 10,000-year perspective and vigourous autonomy of The Long Now Foundation springs immediately to mind. They are, effectively, an expedition to the future.

On both the Impact and “what use is this apparently useless research?” points, I would have suggested a role for a new type of naturally inquisitive ‘curator and explicator’. Someone able to naturally pick up and draw out such tenuous or obscured connections, and from across a wide range of disparate research. Such a unique matchmaking/publicist role would rise far above the low orbit of a university’s PR department, or the middle manager who routinely bundles researchers into funding-worthy projects. Such a role would need a rare combination of curious journalist, art curator, brilliant academic, political operator and publicist.

Daily Paywall

24 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by David Haden in Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

A Pirate Bay for news, it seems: Daily Paywall. An admirably spartan design, at least. Admirable motives, not so much.

dailypaywall

It takes an Aeon…

24 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by David Haden in JURN tips and tricks, New media journal articles, Spotted in the news

≈ 1 Comment

Aeon magazine has a very nice new Save to Instapaper drop-down on its articles, which might usefully be copied by ejournals offering articles in HTML.

saveinsta

Compare the blissful ease of doing this with the impossibility of saving Digital Arts magazine’s new 2015 creative trends survey article to Instapaper. Impossible because of the database-driven URL structure, which loathsomely uses ? in the URL to spawn a new page hanging off of a static URL. I ended up having to copy-paste to a .txt file and then used Amazon’s Send to Kindle desktop software. I guess Digital Arts are assuming their younger clear-eyed readers are going straight to the page on an iPad, rather than needing the ‘old-eyes friendly’ font-scaling on a Kindle.

No mention of this Aeon button on the Instapaper official blog in 2014, so I’m guessing it’s custom to the editors, probably wrapped up in a WordPress widget or similar. But their little button looks like it can be fairly easily implemented in a DIV in your HTML code…

readlatercode

EZB tweaks remove date-range

17 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by David Haden in JURN tips and tricks

≈ Leave a comment

The EZB has evidently had a slight re-design. They’ve removed the ability to set a date-limit on the “List of new EZB journals”. However, the date is still being set in plaintext in the URL itself. Users can dial back the date range by typing a new date at the end of the URL, and then reloading. The dialogue to set a date-range on the page itself has been removed, as has the ability to filter by partly OA titles (now the options are just ‘freely available’ or ‘not accessible’).

http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/searchres.phtml?bibid=AAAAA&colors=1&lang=en&jq_type1=ID&jq_term1=01.12.2014

Google News restores archives

17 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by David Haden in JURN's Google watch, Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

The Google News team has re-enabled the lost archives feature, for searching newspaper archives as far back as 2003…

Great news — we’ve re-enabled archives search! Our team listened to all your feedback you left here in the forum, and was hard at work to bring you an even better archive experience. From all the posts we received, we heard loud and clear how important these archives are to our users. You can now go digging back in time to 2003. Search on :)”

newsarchives

Bing Insights

13 Saturday Dec 2014

Posted by David Haden in How to improve academic search, Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

A new embedded search tool for non-fiction writers, Bing Insights for MS Office. It only seems to work in MS Office Live, rather than as a plugin for older desktop installations of Office. Sadly I just couldn’t find the Insights feature at all in Office Live, when I went to test it. So perhaps it’s not yet been rolled out the UK.

Insights-Abraham-Lincoln-1024x777

But it seems a neat idea, meaning that checking a basic fact no longer entails bouncing out of Word and into a Web browser. The search process also apparently inherits semantic nudges, drawn from the other words and phrases detected in the document. One wonders if the semantic data that Microsoft gain from this will, in time, improve the Bing Search service itself.

I’d expect the Open Source Office software suites to add this sort of fact-checking feature to their Word Processor soon, if they haven’t already (I couldn’t immediately find something similar for Open Office, LibreOffice, etc). Although their natural choice of partner, Wikipedia, might not be the most trustworthy source of facts.

← 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

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
 

Loading Comments...