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.

ROAD

ROAD is a new unified ISSN lookup tool, drawing records from a handful of big databases. What makes it notable is that search results only show records of open access titles. ROAD looks like it might be useful for finding out what’s currently listed where, e.g.: what open access title is in Scopus but is not yet in the DOAJ. ROAD also gives ISSN records that are otherwise held behind paywalls, in databases such as ISSN Register.

Drilling down through the sidebar filters shows ROAD listing only 338 titles in the Arts and Humanities + published in English, despite its accessing the DOAJ and many other databases. Odd.

OAN

I found a German search-engine for material in repositories, OAN. The precision of its single-box keyword search is very poor, at least when using the English language. But OAN does have the ability to filter down to records for periodical articles only, and then to filter these records again by broad subject area. OAN also seems to have made a very strong effort to only include repository records that actually lead to full-text.

Gigablast goes open source

The Gigablast search-engine has open sourced its search-engine code and technology at GutHub…

“An open source web and enterprise search engine for Linux on Intel/AMD. Currently in use on Gigablast.com. A robust, scalable search solution in 100% custom C/C++ that has
been in development and used commercially since 2000. Distributed web crawler. Supports any document conversion plugin to convert PDF, etc. to HTML”

Code currently lacking, though, any “Boolean query support”. That probably doesn’t matter, though, since only a miniscule fraction of seachers actually use Boolean.

AOTD

Open Access Theses and Dissertations (OATD) is a pretty good new search tool. I tested it on “Lovecraft”, an author on whom I maintain a hand-picked list of links to all relevant open scholarly work. While OATD didn’t pick up everything written on the old gent, it still gave a rather good haul.

Scholr.ly

New academic search-engine, Scholr.ly. Launched late summer 2012, and currently only… “indexing computer and information science”.

JSTOR free Register & Read expands to 1,200 titles

JSTOR’s Register & Read beta service has been letting anyone sign up to read up to three JSTOR articles per fortnight, for free. Just to read, mind you — not to download or copy-and-paste. Until now R&R access has been to a mere 77 journals…

But a new Jan 2013 press release proclaims a much meatier “1,200 journals” for the R&R offer…

“more than 1,200 journals [titles .xls] are now available for limited reading by the public. This is part of a major expansion of JSTOR’s experimental program Register & Read…”

R&R access can be had by registering for a MyJSTOR account.

If you need to quote from an R&R article, don’t struggle with retyping the quote into your essay. The Microsoft Office 2007 OneNote ‘screen clipping’ OCR function is your friend, in such cases. OneNote works extremely well at “reading” screengrab images and turning them into editable text, even when the text is very small and a bit rough…

New “Recently available via JURN Search…” rss-powered page

Announcing a new JURN tool: the “Recently available via JURN Search…” page. 180 viable/active RSS feeds, discovered via delving into the 3,000 links on the JURN Directory, and then tied into some whizz-bang Web code. The page only shows the most recent article per journal, then it re-sorts the whole list by date. Without a wider use of RSS among open access ejournals, this page is as near as JURN can get to a “new issue alerts” service, let alone a full TOCs service. It’ll be tweaked and improved over the coming months. Enjoy…

Yes, statistics hounds: only 180 decent RSS feeds after weeding, from 3,000 links. It puts the number of free/open arts and humanities ejournals using RSS autodiscovery at about 6%. In the coming weeks I’ll be doing some Google searching for filetype:rss etc, to see if I can manually discover more. Update: added another 42 feeds.

ctrlQ

The nice little niche search-engine ctrlQ: RSS Search Engine displays “full URL” RSS feed links, as part of the search results. Another, Search4RSS is similar. Not sure if they just do basic RSS autodiscover, or if they’re also delving deeper looking for .rdf, .rss links etc. It would be great if this functionality was also in the main Google Search results, perhaps via a Greasemonkey script?

UK Gateway to Research beta

Beta Gateway to Research, a unified search tool for all projects funded by the various UK research councils since 2006. Daily Mail hacks are no doubt having a field day with this one…

List of open ejournals in Scopus, and WoS

A handy new combo list of the open ejournal titles included in PubMed, Scopus and the ISI Master Journal List. Since PubMed and ISI are overwhelmingly medical/science, the list is largely a lookup table for open access arts and humanities titles in Scopus…

  Languages and Literatures: 280
  History and Archaeology: 198
  Philosophy and Religion: 162
  Communication and Information: 145
  Arts and Architecture: 137
  General and Multidisciplinary: 43

  Total of the above, at Dec 2012: 965.

---

As for the omitted Web of Science, the last I heard was that at the end of May 2011 the Transforming Scholarly Communication blog had posted a list (my .xls version) of all open access titles in WoS, showing that…

“The Web of Science database (including Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index, and Social Sciences Citation Index) now indexes close to 1,000 peer-reviewed open access titles”.

But I just found a paper published in 2012, “Challenges for open access journals”, which gave a figure of… “864 open access journals” in arts and humanities in Web of Science.

How researchers discover scholarly content

Inside Higher Ed has a useful summary of new large-scale research on “How Readers Discover Content in Scholarly Journals”.

Google Scholar: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

“Google Scholar: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly“, a short free Powerpoint from the University of Leeds in the UK. It’s a useful up-to-date summary, but I’d worry about the document’s opening claim that Google Scholar has… “Almost 100% coverage of journals from partner databases and publicly available TOCs”. This may mislead people into assuming that Google Scholar has complete coverage. It doesn’t. As I’ve said before, it is rather poor at including the contents of large numbers of open access arts and humanities ejournals.

Questia to revamp, relaunch

I hear that Questia is to… “relaunch this summer with an all-new updated look and feel”. Questia is a low-cost commercial buffet-style online research library, aimed at students. It claims to be… “the world’s largest online collection of books and journal articles in the humanities and social sciences”.

Incidentally, I also note that Open J-Gate hasn’t come back online after five months away — it went offline in February 2012 and is now just a holding page. Does anyone know if it’s likely to be coming back?

Getty Research Portal for art history texts

The Getty Research Institute has announced the Getty Research Portal…

“a free online search gateway that aggregates descriptive metadata of digitized art history texts, with links to fully digitized copies that are free to download.”

Launch date is the 31st of May 2012.

Search study of the ‘digital natives’

A new paper, “A study of the information search behaviour of the millennial generation” [those born between 1982 and 2000]. The paper found; erratic information search processes; only limited attempts to evaluate the quality / timeliness / validity of information found.

How readers find books

How Consumers Discover Books Online, a Feb 2012 presentation at O’Reilly TOC 2012, by the CEO of GoodReads…

“Otis Chandler, CEO of Goodreads, would like to provide an in-depth quantitative and qualitative analysis of consumer behavior in discovering books online. Who is searching for books online? What are their personas? How are they discovering books? How many are they discovering, and how many do they go on to read? Are there strong influencers? What factors can help a book get discovered online? How is the picture different for books in the head vs the long tail?”

A quick guide to desktop search software

The Google Desktop Search software became officially defunct toward the end of 2011. But one can still download the last 5.9.1 version, and it happily installs and indexes and searches the full-text of your content. For instance, a folder full of Gbs of PDF encyclopaedias and journal articles, ebooks, etc, presenting results in a familiar Google Search interface. Note the indexing has to be manually started by you, and this is done by right-clicking the taskbar icon and selecting “reindex”…

But if you need a personal desktop search product that’s being supported and developed, perhaps due to the need to index a new file-format, then the alternatives are…

* the free ad-supported Copernic Desktop Search. Well-reviewed and mature software. Can be a bit aggressive in its initial indexing, but then it works quickly and intuitively. There is also a Copernic Desktop Search Professional Edition. The best everyday replacement for Google Desktop Search.

* DocFetcher 1.1 is a Java-based desktop search software, that’s open source and free. It’s been around since 2009, but doesn’t seem to have any genuine reviews (that I could find). Supports indexing of Open Office file types.

* dtSearch Desktop (£119, PC World review from 2011). A very mature and powerful software, although the price of $199 will likely make it unappealing to personal users. The dauntingly powerful interface will also likely make it unappealing to small business users.

* the new X1 Desktop Search. The X1 website’s main landing page seems to be positioning the X1 range for the corporate market.

* the free built-in Windows 7 search. Although now tamed, and no longer the fearsome disk-grinding Windows Vista incarnation, in my view turning on Windows Search still makes a desktop PC too slow. Especially if you run a PC stuffed to the top with legacy files and emails.

How do Researchers in the Humanities Use Information Resources?

Ellen Collins and Michael Jubb. “How do Researchers in the Humanities Use Information Resources?“, Liber Quarterly, Volume 21 (2012), No.2.

Surfing the Public Domain

The Public Domain Review has a new online leaflet, A Guide to Finding Interesting Public Domain Works Online.