“Access to Freely Available Journal Articles” (2017)

Access to Freely Available Journal Articles: Gold, Green, and Rogue Open Access across the Disciplines (2016 conference presentation script/summary, published 2017)…

“We randomly selected 300 articles that were indexed in Scopus and published in 2015. A hundred of them are from the arts and humanities, and a hundred of them are from the social sciences, and a hundred are from the life sciences, and all of them, again, randomly selected.”

These 300 appear to have been a random mix of paywall and OA and were then searched for on Google, Google Scholar, Researchgate, and Sci-Hub. The researchers were simply looking for free public copies of the articles, wherever they could be found.

The methodology used is slightly fuzzily explained…

“We just did a title search. We didn’t do anything further than the title search”.

Fuzzy, because a Google “full-title” known-title search “as a phrase” is not the safest way to go about such a test. Due to the way Google Search works, ideally one would want to search on the first 50 characters of the title instead of on the entirety of a long academic article-title.

Also, Scopus is poor at indexing Open Access, only managing 29.18% coverage of the DOAJ Open Access titles even in 2017. And the Scopus spreadsheet, now sortable by OA status, indicates Scopus has very poor coverage of OA arts and humanities titles. So 100 arts and humanities articles from Scopus is not a great starting point, even if suitably randomised. The sample will likely skew heavily toward paywall articles.

Anyway, even with these limitations the results for public full-text free-access were somewhat interesting. From left to right, just for the 100 Arts & Humanities articles: Google Scholar, Google Search, Researchgate, and Sci-Hub (prior to its recent problems)…

Sci-Hub was known to have severe problems accessing things like recent Project MUSE articles, so perhaps glitches like that prevented an even higher result than 86%.

Added to JURN

Northwestern Review

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Bay Nature (conservation of habitats and wildlife in the San Francisco Bay Area)

Added to JURN

Bulletin of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies

Journal of Perpetrator Research

Royal Studies Journal

Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association — now directly indexed.

Delhi Declaration on Open Access

An apparently new Delhi Declaration on Open Access…

“The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists only 200 out of the 20,000+ journals being published from India.”

Yes, the DOAJ part of the statement is correct. I downloaded the DOAJ .CSV, sorted by Country. There are indeed currently 201 journals in the DOAJ with a country identifier “India”.

At November 2013 the DOAJ figure for “India” was 598, so presumably a great many Indian-published OA titles went during ‘the great purging’ at DOAJ.

But the Declaration’s “20,000+ journals being published from India” can’t all be Open Access. Presumably by “20,000+” the authors are talking about all journals, of all types. Thus it might have been better and fairer to DOAJ if the Declaration had been rather more precise, by comparing the 200 DOAJ-listed OA journals to the total number of known non-predatory OA journals published from India.

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Update:

An India and Pakistan study of “open access journals indexed by Scopus up to Oct 2017” found that the “major share of journals are from India, which contributes 593 Journals in which only 218 (37%) journals are currently active” (Akhoon and Ganaie, “Status of Open Access: Across Borders”, 2018).

Getty kills Google Image’s ‘View image’ button: how to fix it

Under pressure from commercial image library Getty, Google Images has removed a key button from its search results. It’s the “View Image” button, which allowed people to view an image in isolation, against whatever colour they have set as a background for the Web browser.

The removal is easily fixed with a simple new script:

Firefox: Google Images Fix for Greasemonkey.

Chrome and Chrome-compatible: Google Search "View Image" Button

If you also want to change the default background colour (white can be better for screen-shots of logos for Facebook posts, to get an edge), in Firefox you can change the Web browser’s default background from black thus: Tools | Options | Content | Colours | Background | OK.

There are also press reports that the “search by image” icon in the Google Images search box is to be removed, also due to Getty pressure. But I see it’s still there on the UK version of Google Images.

Massive Bronze figure unearthed

“The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles” (Feb 2018, PeerJ)…

“the most common mechanism for OA is not Gold, Green, or Hybrid OA, but rather an under-discussed category we dub Bronze: articles made free-to-read on the publisher website, without an explicit Open license.”

Of Bronze, “few studies have highlighted its role” [in OA]. “We manually inspected a small sample of Bronze articles in order to understand this subcategory more; we found that while many Bronze articles were Delayed OA from toll-access publishers, nearly half were hosted on journals that published 100% of content as free-to-read but were not listed on the DOAJ and did not formally license content (using CC-BY or any other license).”

Bronze was found to be at a whopping 47% of OA, from a one-week sample of Unpaywall-DOIs in 2017.

Added to JURN

Journal of the General Union of Arab Archaeologists

Demokratizatsiya (to 2012, on post-Soviet Russia)

Swiss Analytics Magazine (Swiss Association for Analytics)