The COAR of the issue

A useful new analysis today from COAR, “Don’t believe the hype: repositories are critical for ensuring equity, inclusion and sustainability in the transition to open access”. Recent…

publishers’ comments portray gold open access as the only ‘legitimate’ route for open access, and attempt to diminish the repository (or green) route.

According to the author, some publishers are even implying that repositories have no aggregators, or are not present in Google Search or in specialist search-engines such as Scholar and GRAFT. Laughably, they apparently suggest that poor over-worked researchers will instead…

need to search through individual repositories to find the articles.

The publishers are also said to be trying to stop all but a sub-set of elite repositories from being used for data deposit, via…

proposing to define the repository selection criteria for where their authors’ should deposit research data. These criteria, which are very narrowly conceived, threaten to exclude thousands of national and institutional repositories as options for deposit.

Again, this sounds like it is designed to make researchers feel it’s more convenient to publish their article + data via a big publisher.

Twitter to Nitter

There’s a useful and unique new UserScript. In search results, always redirect the links on Twitter hits to Nitter. Useful if you’re not a Twitter user, but may occasionally want to peek at a perhaps-useful Twitter hit in search.

If the main Nitter is being “rate limited” by Twitter, there’s another script that’s a Nitter Instance Switcher and offers a link to a random mirror site.

A full Instance (mirror) list is here at GitHub, if you need to find a few fresh ones.

Tucows is burger-ed

List updated, May 2021.

The Tucows site has closed its doors and shipped the famous cows off to the local burger-flipping joint. In the early years of the broadband Internet the Tucows site was a go-to-place for desktop PC freeware for Windows, and well-known for its “two cows” graphic logo.

Key ongoing alternatives for users of desktop PCs and classic Windows freeware in 2021 are…

New! Tucows Software Library is now archived at the Internet Archive!

Softpedia. The usual go-to, found from a general shallow-search search-engine such as DuckDuckGo. Mixes trials with well-documented freeware, but it’s obvious which is which.

Lo4D, I rarely use it, but it’s useful if you want a second opinion on a Softpedia find.

MajorGeeks. The best for tracking freeware on a daily or weekly basis, re: what’s new or updated. Also very comprehensive, to the point of including selected trialware and shareware. Just avoid the scattered text ads for downloads of the Malwarebytes software, which is ‘limpet-ware’ — it does what it says, but is a lead-in to a purchase and I found it to be extremely difficult to remove once installed.

Filepanda.cc is a possible fallback.

OldApps is also useful if you need a specific older version. Despite the name, it’s classic Windows desktop software and not mobile apps. Here you find software from more than about five years ago, it seems. It also has some Mac pages, and useful forums.

GitHub Search can be useful, if you know what functionality you’re looking for and the precise terminology. Such as Scan Tailor Experimental 2015 for automatic de-curving of photos of opened book pages.

A final backstop is The Internet Archive Software Collection which has all sorts of golden oldies for Windows. Such as a 2020 version of the avast_free_antivirus_setup_offline.exe installer — to run on an older Windows 7 PC offline server for some special academic use. Later 2021 versions of this leading freeware anti-virus refused to install on old Windows 7 PCs. Archive.org also has ISOs of old magazine cover-CDs and DVDs. You’ll need a freeware tool to mount the ISO, such as Daemon Tools Lite or WinCDEmu. The latter can mount ISOs without needing a special driver, which can be useful on persnickety workstation PCs.

Being a bit of a connoisseur of rare or overlooked graphics and utility freeware for the Windows desktop, I also know that many nice bits of freeware never reach such sites, and reside on the maker site or some specialist software-specific directory like Paint.NET Plugins Index. Sometimes the latest updates from a solo maker are only ever posted on forum threads, with Dropbox links, and that’s the last you hear of him. In such cases, a search with a deep-search engine such as Google is often needed, as such recent or forum-buried things are usually not highly ranked by the search-engines. Yippy can also be useful for finding free scripts. (Yippy now dead).

Finally, avoid sites like FileHippo, which used to be good but have turned to the dark side.

Sweep away the breadcrumbs

Got nasty breadbrumbs in your Google Search, again? An update to the free UserScript Google Search restore URLs (undo breadcrumbs) fixes that, restoring full human-readable URL paths in your search results. Having URL paths visible is vital for instantly detecting and blocking spam, something which Google’s mega-mind AI seems unable to learn to do. After a while, the experienced searcher learns to spot the half-dozen common types of spam URLs. An obvious example…

A garbled hash forms part of the URL + an .it domain + a movie ‘download’ offer = definitely robo-spam and likely dangerous too. Why is it even in Google Search, and for search terms that have nothing to do with Thundercats?

On the cards

The leading graphics-card developer NVIDIA has a new NVIDIA NGC catalog that…

provides GPU-optimized AI software for data engineers, data scientists, developers, and DevOps teams” and these are “optimized to run on NVIDIA GPU cloud instances, such as the Amazon EC2 P4d instance.

Apparently free, though the December press-release called it a “Storefront”. Presumably the modules are free, but you then pay to have them pondered by Amazon’s super-brain.