‘A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…’

Ten years ago, today…

JISC ITT commission: A study to forecast a delivery, management & access model for eprints & open access journals within Further and Higher Education. … Access should be streamlined and free at the point of use, irrespective of the source of content.

Submission deadline:
   10th March 2004 12:00
Funding:
   £30,000

Added to JURN

Minerva (Philosophy)

Journal of The Institute of Justice and International Studies

Reports and Working Papers of the International Council on Human Rights Policy

Trent Law Journal / Nottingham Law Journal (1977—2013)

Fabian Tracts, 1884—1997 (At the LSE. Any accessible volumes list / entry page appears to have vanished, but the PDFs are still online and known to Google)

Bridgewater Review

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Better indexing of free chapters from SAGE, via an additional URL path.

Added to JURN

Multicultural Shakespeare : translation, appropriation and performance

Text Matters

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Collection of Polish language ejournals archived at the University of Lodz, Poland.

Added to JURN

American Jewish Archives Journal (1948-2012)

Encounters (Danish Association for Science and Technology Studies)

Journal of Media Innovations

APRJA (digital cultures)

Palgrave free in March 2014

All Palgrave’s paywall journals have been temporarily added to the JURN index…

“From 1st-31st March 2014, Palgrave Macmillan will be offering free online access to their full journals portfolio. All current and archival content spanning the Humanities, the Social Sciences and Business will be available. Researchers – just start browsing, or search for titles and topics of interest. During March you will have access to ALL articles.”

Access works fine, with a no-nonsense click-and-load of PDFs via Google links.

Dutch OA indexed at just 11% in Web of Science

Wouter has today posted a Powerpoint with a slide showing the number of Dutch open access articles and reviews indexed in Web of Science, 1995-2015…

It’s good to see coverage is ‘on the up’, but it seems that open access journal content from the Netherlands is currently indexed in WoS at just 11%. This is another indication of the low level of OA journal article discoverability in big commercial databases, and a reminder that the coming Google Scholar / Web of Science combo interface won’t make Scholar a one-stop shop for finding open access articles.

Crazy English Teachers

Thanks to the (new?) English-translated version of the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) journal search service, I’m happy to know there’s a journal in China called Crazy English Teachers

Added to JURN

Feminist Africa

Journal of Lithic Studies (archaeological research into the manufacture and use of stone tools)

Integritas : Advancing the Mission of Catholic Higher Education

AI magazine (Artificial intelligence, 18 month paywall)

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Open access media studies journals noted as starting very soon:

Series: TV serial narratives.

Media Industries.

Added to JURN

Intersect : The Stanford Journal of Science, Technology & Society

BWPI Working Papers (Brooks World Poverty Institute, Manchester)

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Catalog of onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu (Indexing the subject + titles listing pages only. A curated list, this seems to allow JURN to partly touch the best of the non-fiction in Hathi, Archive.org etc, without loading up with umpteen editions of Heidi and the Lost Cave and similar bits of forgotten fiction)

Indexing of OA Communication Studies journals

More new research on Open Access ejournal penetration into commercial journal indexing databases: “Open Access Journals in Communication Studies: Indexing in Five Commercial Databases” (2014). Only…

32 percent of the 147 gold OA journals identified [in Communication Studies] were indexed in five major commercial bibliographical databases commonly subscribed to by academic libraries [including Scopus, EBSCO Complete, Web of Science]

Global Social Science & Humanities Publishing 2013-2014

Joseph Esposito has usefully snagged a peek inside a very expensive commercial market report titled Global Social Science & Humanities Publishing 2013-2014.

Social/Humanities publishing is found to be perhaps 25% of the size of Science/Technology/Medicine, at around $5bn. That actually strikes me as something of an achievement, when you consider that we have far smaller research funding inputs and a smaller technical/training infrastructure to call on. But perhaps the $5bn figure is given a strong boost by teacher training textbooks, social work manuals and the like?

Joseph highlights the report’s finding of a highly fragmented market. This market fragmentation is one of the reasons I’m sceptical about the success of a ‘one metadata to rule them all’ solution to OA indexing and discovery. It seems that DOAJ-listed OA journal titles can’t even find their way in full-text into the largest of commercial databases (such as EBSCO Complete) at higher levels than just over 20%. When last heard of the Web of Science / Scopus seemed to be barely scraping 1,000 OA arts and humanities titles indexed. One art history study found that Google Scholar could index only half the DOAJ’s OA art history titles. A dastardly conspiracy to keep OA titles out of these big indexes seems unlikely. So I suspect it’s largely due to many OA editors in the arts and humanities not giving a fig about providing the means to automatically index their content. Their widespread lack of something as basic as RSS feeds seems to confirm that. Persuading them to even glance at a new bit of metadata, let alone tag all their back-issue content with it, thus seems rather a long shot. Nor are librarians like to be of much use, after the fact of publication, since they seem to have mostly failed to apply even their own metadata standards to open content.

Added to JURN

Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society (1880-2008)

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PhilSci, IEEE, CiteSeerX, NAP Books, and NCBI Bookshelf. Better and more precise indexing of relevant full-text at edoc.hu-berlin.de.

Historical book archive of the U.S. National Park Service, and the U.S. Forest Service Research Publications archive.

Mind the Watford Gap

Cameron Neylon has rustled up a useful map of the public libraries in the UK which are set to offer free access to 8,000 commercial paywalled academic ejournals…

Very nice if you’re in the leafy Home Counties around London, not so useful for those in the industrial Midlands or the North. Although the use terms (“I can only use accessed information for non-commercial research and private study”) make such business access moot for people such as the cybersecurity boffins of Malvern or the ceramics R&D teams of Stoke-on-Trent.

Oh well, there’s always JURN, now with added business and science goodness.

Added to JURN

ThirdFront : Journal of Humanities and Social Science

Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh

JeDEM : eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government

Science Editor (One year paywall)

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Three URLs intended to widen coverage of open articles in geology.

New study on OA in full-text commercial databases

A 2013 study “Open access journal content found in commercial full-text aggregation databases and journal citation reports”…

“A study was conducted regarding the indexing of [DOAJ listed] open access journals in three large, commercially available full-text aggregation databases [EBSCOhost Academic Search Complete; Gale Onefile; and Proquest 5000 International]“

EBSCOhost Complete was the best of the three, claiming indexing of just over 20% of DOAJ-listed OA journals in full-text. The marketing claims/lists on this were taken at face value, and were not verified. Nor was the indexing checked for being up-to-date.

SORA

It’s great when a small field comes together, scans all its journals, and puts them all online for free on a single no-nonsense website. Added to JURN with a single URL: SORA, a huge set of 80,000 journal articles and monographs documenting… “the history of ornithology in North America over the last 120 years”.

Mapping Scientific Excellence

Mapping Scientific Excellence is an interesting new infographic website. The dynamic maps are based on the number of academic papers that were well-cited and/or published in prestigious journals. The papers are from the sciences, plus psychology and social studies.

Above: distribution for papers in Medicine, by author university affiliation.

Added to JURN

Metamorphosis

Ecology and Society

National Journal of Sexual Orientation Law (1995-1998)

Quietus, The

Research Trends

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All indexing URLs have been checked for their continuing presence on the Google Search results. All link URLs in the JURN Directory have been checked. JURN is now as link-rot free, and as repaired and up-to-date, as it can be.

The Scholarly Stream does OA, at London Book Fair 2014

The Scholarly Stream, part of London Book Fair in early April 2014. Lots of short Open Access panels, and a focus on publishers.

Towards a Google Scholar API

Wouter has hacked out a Google Scholar API workflow today, sort of. I suspect the reason Scholar has never offered an API is the agreements Google has with the large commercial journal publishers and citation database providers.