Radio Times searchable listings – now back to 1923

The UK’s Radio Times listings magazine is available online from 1923 to 2009. The magazine was once the nation’s vital weekly TV and radio listings title. When last noted on the JURN blog, back in 2014, I think the new online listings had only extended as far back as the 1960s. Possibly there were also no thumbnail cover-scans back in 2014, but there are now.

You can’t actually click through to hear programmes, due to a combination of the trades unions and the surprising and very regrettable lack of tape archives. So if you do spot gems in the listings, like the 26-part radio history of The British Seafarer (1980) with music and FX by the Radiophonic Workshop… it’s gone forever.

Added to JURN

The Chapels Society Newsletter (small chapels in the UK)

Studia Arabistyczne i Islamistyczne / Arabic and Islamic Studies

opensource.google.com

There’s now a unified directory for Google’s open source projects, opensource.google.com.

All-Sky Survey

The All-Sky Survey is extracting observation pictures from old astronomy journals and newsletters, and adding them into existing systems to make them discoverable in an easy manner.

Added to JURN

Journal of Astronomy in Culture

REED Online (indexing the per-county ‘performance traditions’ papers only)

Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry (now restored to JURN’s search results)

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West Midland Bird Club Annual Reports (UK Midlands, 1934-2013)

Added to JURN

Aegean Studies and associated book reviews.

Newsletter on Aegean Prehistory (2009-2015, one year paywall) (Not, it seems, to be confused with Aegean Prehistoric News 2011-2013 from the same organisation — since the latter has its own page.)

Bulletins des Seances / Mededelingen der Zittingen and Memoirs (Royal Academy for Overseas Sciences, Belgium)

Chronos

Chronos is a new Gates Foundation website, offering a closed list of open access journals to publish in…

“Gates-funded researchers and Gates employees will use this service [to] search for journals offering open access options”

It’s non-public, and is presumably in the form of a whitelist. It’ll be interesting to see if the list becomes public at some point.

Another predatory journal sting

Predatory journals recruit fake editor, a new sting published by Nature. The sample in the study was a…

“pseudo-randomly select [of] 120 English-language journals that matched Szust’s expertise from each list. [JCR, DOAJ, and Beall’s List]”

The fake editor’s profile seems somewhat skewed toward the result the researchers may have been hoping for, having purported expertise in…

“the theory of science and sport, cognitive sciences and methodological bases of social sciences”.

It doesn’t seem that the proportion of the psuedo-random pick from each list was weighted, to account for the relative numbers of journals on each list which matched the editor’s profile. But since it’s been published by Nature, one has to assume that maybe the methodology was sound. The results are about what one might expect…

“40 predatory [Beall’s List] and 8 DOAJ journals appointed her as an editor … Of the 8 DOAJ journals that accepted Szust as editor, 6 remain on the directory as of March 2017.”

I note that, though perhaps it’s a co-incidence, the DOAJ has just thrown out a great many Bentham journal titles from their directory, citing ‘Suspected editorial misconduct by publisher’.

I should probably note here that Bentham has never been directly indexed in JURN, and that JURN doesn’t actively seek to directly index social studies or psychology or general education studies journals. Although some university titles in those areas will be incidentally included via general direct indexing of multi-journal OJS installations and repositories at universities. Such titles will also be included via JURN picking up article records from the DOAJ, Paperity, J-Stage and similar trusted aggregators.

Numdam back again

Restored to JURN search results: the PDFs at Numdam, the French digital mathematics journal library. The site’s curators had changed the URL path for the article PDFs. PDFs are also now being indexed at both their servers.

DuckDuckGo MultiColumns fix – March 2017

The old DuckDuckGo MultiColumns v.5 script no longer works with the Duck’s search results page. Upgrading to DuckDuckGo – Multi-Columns v.7 fixes the problem.

1. You first need to remove the 0.5 script, which is found under: Tools | Addons | User Scripts.

2. Install version 0.7. This will show up is a new place, under: Tools | Addons | UserStyles.

3. The script’s garish results numbering will default to ‘visible’, but it’s easy to fix this. Click on Edit to edit the script. Change both results numbering colour codes to the same neutral colour hex code…

The result of this change is that the distracting red/gold flash of the results numbering becomes a simple light blue-grey dot, which gently aids the eye in passing across the results but which doesn’t distract…

4. To also change the garish tomato + violet colours of the domain + link URL in each result, to the more restful blues shown above, fix the colour hexes in the script here…

For a traditional green look, try a colour combination like #089000 and #479458

5. To fix the colour of the highlighted word(s) in the results snippet, fix the colour here. I’ve set it to a dark blue that’s not quite black…

Then press Save to save the changed script.

Then, to prevent such changes being overwritten, turn off automatic updates for the script.

That’s it. Enjoy multicolumn desktop-friendly searching in DuckDuckGo…