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News from JURN

Monthly Archives: April 2020

UK scraps 20% sales tax early, for e-journals

30 Thursday Apr 2020

Posted by David Haden in Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

The UK government has just announced that “Plans to scrap VAT on e-publications have been fast-tracked, and will come into force tomorrow”. VAT is the UK’s main sales tax. This should mean cheaper lockdown e-reading and research — so long as publishers and Amazon don’t just keep prices the same and pocket the 20% as extra profit. The move covers “e-books, e-newspapers, e-magazines and academic e-journals”, but seemingly not audiobooks. The change will be permanent, and had been scheduled for December 2020.

The UK government will also spend £35 million in taking out ‘public education’ print ads in newspapers, over the next three months. This will be “split between local, regional and national print media”, with what appears to be a strong tilt toward what the government calls the “most-trusted” print newspapers. This may imply that the shoddy, slipshod and alarmist reporting we’ve seen could be about to have financial consequences for newspapers.

Dumb devices

25 Saturday Apr 2020

Posted by David Haden in Ooops!

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Oh dear, it’s 2020 and the biggest and most AI-powered services on the planet are still relying on dumb keyword-blocking. AbeBooks reports that the pulp sci-fi double-bill paperback Mask of Chaos/The Star Virus has been classed by Amazon as a “medical device” and banned from sale.

Ironically, Amazon is still listing bat faeces sent from China, delivered to your door here in the UK. Apparently medical pseudo-science believes it to be a remedy for poor eyesight.

Added to JURN

25 Saturday Apr 2020

Posted by David Haden in New titles added to JURN

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Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum (history of science).

Sound Stage Screen (sound and musicology of stage and cinema).

Journal of Juvenilia Studies (history of literary juvenilia, also amateur literary publishing by juveniles).

History of Classical Scholarship and the HCS Supplementary Volumes open book series.

Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections (two-year paywall, March 2018 is the latest open issue).

Praticas da Historia : Journal on Theory, Historiography and Uses of the Past (Portugal, about 30-40% of each issue is in English).

Knowledge Organization (JURN indexes open articles from 1974-2016, although this entails bringing in four years of paywall articles to 2020. The options were i) ‘all to 1999’ and no paywalled articles, or ii) ‘all to 2020’ and annoy searchers by including four years of paywalled articles. It was decided that it was worth some annoyance to get an extra 16 years of open content into JURN).


HortTechnology (horticultural technologies, with substantial cross-over to native plants, tackling invasive disease, and topics such as public education and landscape use)

On auto-downloading open access books

21 Tuesday Apr 2020

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

≈ Leave a comment

Martin Paul Eve has a new post on Zotero and auto-downloading open access books…

all I really wanted was to be able to embed an ISBN and a citation_pdf_url and have Zotero do the lookup and save the file. However, out of the box there is no easy way to do this.

His test book is quite interesting, his own new Close Reading with Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (April 2020), which applies textual computing to the science-fiction-philosophy novel Cloud Atlas.

I don’t know about or use the current version of Zotero, so I’m unsure what advantages it confers. I assume Eve intended to find a way to automatically harvest all CC-SA books in PDF, and build a local collection for automated analysis.

But I see his book is already on the OA book aggregator catalogue OAPEN. Theoretically then, since OAPEN is comprehensive and timely, one could have a harvester look at all the pages hanging off library.oapen.org/handle/ and save out only those pages with the required permissive CC “Rights” label on them. These pages each have a uniform PDF link URL in their HTML, in the form of library.oapen.org/bitstream/ and these could be easily extracted to a list. One would end up with a set of PDF links for a linkbot, ready to download to a local folder for computational analysis. I presume that’s what Eve intended to have Zotero do.

One would need to reference the OAPEN record page first, in the way I’ve suggested, since the PDF itself can have different or non-uniform or contradictory licence information. For instance in its interior Eve’s book is labelled as both “©” … “No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.” and also “Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0”.

How many items on OAPEN have a creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/ “Rights” label at present, as Martin’s book does? A Google site: search suggests around 650 titles. Half an hour of my filtering the OAPEN CSV suggests it’s actually just over 3,000 under some form of permissive CC that permits commercial use. That’s still a manageable harvest at present. But as the supply of OA books and monographs grows rapidly, the likely result of various OA mandates in the near-future, it might be a useful time-saver for text-miners and digital humanists if OAPEN were to maintain a single torrent of all the PDFs. Inside which a half dozen folders would neatly organise the books by CC licence type. Such a one-click solution might save a lot of faffing around with digging into and filtering their XML and CSV feeds, wrangling with harvester scripts and timeouts, or trying to wrestle with third-party services such as Zotero. A torrent could also save OAPEN’s bandwidth.

How to delete the invasive new “Share with Skype” menu item

17 Friday Apr 2020

Posted by David Haden in JURN tips and tricks

≈ 5 Comments

Here’s how to delete the invasive new “Share with Skype” menu item, newly located on your right-click menu in your Windows PC. This has been added without permission by the latest update for desktop Skype, and is a pointless distraction for anyone who just uses Skype for calls.

There appears to be no way to turn it off from within Skype. I can’t get it to show up in any context menu-editor except the Windows Registry Editor.

How to remove it…

1. Go to the Windows Start menu. In the search box type regedit to launch the Windows Registry Editor.

2. The key you want to delete is easily found under…

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell

3. Right-click on the key’s label (shown here highlighted in blue). Delete it.

4. Exit the Registry Editor.

The menu item is gone, but not gone for good. It will return when desktop Skype is next updated, and the key will thus need to be repeatedly deleted.

OApen update

16 Thursday Apr 2020

Posted by David Haden in New titles added to JURN

≈ Leave a comment

As of yesterday OAPEN has a new URL path for its record-pages and PDFs, with (it seems) no re-directs. The URL paths have been updated in JURN, but they are not yet known to Google Search — and thus JURN is temporarily without OAPEN results.

DOI hard

08 Wednesday Apr 2020

Posted by David Haden in Ooops!, Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

“On the Persistence of Persistent Identifiers of the Scholarly Web” is a new paper from Los Alamos, finding that many DOIs in a 10,000 random sample are unreachable…

“consistently across request methods, more than half of our DOIs fail to successfully resolve to a target resource”

Despite the misleading “2004” tag on the page identifier tag, the paper was actually presented in March 2020 at the CNI Spring 2020 Project Briefings.

ACM Digital Library, free until June 2020

06 Monday Apr 2020

Posted by David Haden in Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

The Association for Computing Machinery’s substantial ACM Digital Library is now free until the end of June 2020. Includes magazine and journals. A test shows that the most recent issues of these are included. There doesn’t appear to be a log-on requirement, they’re just all free to visitors. There’s also a handy unified search-box…

Open Access discovery wranglers may find the ACM workflow handbook Data Cleaning (July 2019) of special interest.

Attitudes of North American Academics toward Open Access Scholarly Journals

05 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by David Haden in Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

A new survey “Attitudes of North American Academics toward Open Access Scholarly Journals”. A questionnaire was sent to 15,000 in the U.S. and Canada, both faculty and grad students, with 2,121 responses. The results indicated a high level of antipathy toward open access in the Arts & Humanities. Rather more surprisingly, it was about the same in Social Studies…

Search All Free Image

05 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by David Haden in Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

A newly updated UserScript Search All Free Image [JPG+PNG+ICO]. It can be forked, and thus could be a quickstart for someone to re-target the script from stock/clipart/icons to CC0 pictures at museums.

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