Access to journals in Pakistan

African universities often have better access to journal databases than western counterparts, thanks to big aid deals for the continent, but I wondered if Pakistan has a similar full-range access. I had a quick initial look at the journal-access situation in Pakistan, and soon found the national HEC Digital Library and its list of included databases and publishers…

“HEC National Digital Library (DL) is a[n official national] programme to provide researchers within public and private universities in Pakistan and non-profit research and development organizations with access to international scholarly literature based on electronic (online) delivery, providing access to high quality, peer-reviewed journals, databases, articles and e-Books across a wide range of disciplines.”

The supplied databases look like a wide selection and are available to bona fide institutions in Pakistan, though it looks like there’s a certain subset of databases reserved for larger institutions only.

Access there looks like it is broadly comparable to a medium-sized university in the west, if “The impact of non-accessible library and information science journals on research productivity in Pakistan” in 2016 in anything to go by. It found, from Pakistan…

“18% non-accessible and 37% partially accessible LIS journals on the HEC subscribed databases.”

Thought I note that, since then, Pakistan’s HEC Digital Library has added Gale, Oxford, Proquest, and probably others. Which has likely shortened the gap.

A 2009 grassroots report found that the main problem in access was said to be due to the frequent power-cuts, rather than databases…

“the respondents emphasized that electricity failure is the main hindrance to access to the digital library and to the Internet”

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Open Semantic Desktop Search – free desktop search for Windows

Open Semantic Desktop Search an “open source desktop search engine for full text search in documents”, that runs in SOLR on the Windows desktop through Oracle’s free VM VirtualBox. It’s been around since late 2015, and is actively being developed, but they obviously don’t employ a publicist to promote it.

It has a clean Web-like interface, supports the indexing of a great many file-types including .ePUB and .PDF files, even if they’re inside .ZIP files. Though it can’t yet index the Kindle’s .MOBI ebook files, so you’d need to do an overnight mass-conversion to .ePUB or .PDF using the free Calibre software, and your purchased encrypted Kindle files will still need to be searched using Amazon.

Despite being run in a VM (often slow in older Windows PCs), Open Semantic Desktop Search can work on…

“old standard hardware” and “The search engine works even offline or unhosted on a single laptop without need of a intranet or internet connection or a server.”

Though online comments suggest you’ll do best with a modern PC, and those with an over-stuffed hard-drive will need to clear 50Gb of disk-space to accommodate both the software and its resulting index. The disk-space needed may be less if you’re only indexing the folder containing the .PDFs and .ePUBs needed for your PhD or book research.

I haven’t installed and tested it yet, but it’s free and looks good. Apparently it can also auto-OCR inside PDFs that don’t have OCR text, a new feature added in a December 2017 update.

The search-engine software comes packaged in a 2.8Gb .OVA file that you download. This .OVA is a plugin module for the free VM VirtualBox (a 110Mb .EXE download), and the team’s Desktop Search page has instructions on how to plug your .OVA into the installed VM. It seems fairly simple to get it up and running.

Evaluating Access of Open Access Research

“Practicing What You Preach: Evaluating Access of Open Access Research” (2017)…

“To explore the effectiveness of the new OA [DOI-based] finding tools, the next step of the study used the Chrome extensions for Google Scholar, Lazy Scholar (LS), Unpaywall, and the Open Access Button (OAB) to look for green OA versions of paywalled articles. [At 160 articles] The study sample size was triple the amount of articles that Grandbois and Beheshti (2014) found in their study.”

4m Open Library books, full-text, deep search

You can now ‘search inside’ all 4m Open Library books held at Archive.org, with your search seemingly constrained to just those books (and not the jumble that Archive.org also hosts). Nice results, with multi-snippets from deep inside the full-text of the books, plus phrase highlighting. This looks like excellent work, and it takes advantage of new tweaks by Archive.org’s search leader Giovanni Damiola.

A serious history researcher is still going to need to pound Archive.org itself and go through everything, but at first glance this seems to be a useful time-saver for those who only need to search the upper layers of the service.

The ultimate goal of the Open Library is “One Web page for every book ever published”. Think of it as one of those annoying university repositories where 95% of the full-text is not available yet, but will be one day… so “here’s a record page instead”. But in this case it’s for all books, and already has a substantial amount of full-text for free.

On ResearchGate

What publishers can take away from the latest early career researcher research ($), a five-page “Industry Update” for the journal Learned Publishing, 28th April 2018…

“ResearchGate is unquestionably the scholarly elephant in the room, which despite being just 10 years old boasts 15 million research members and is still growing at a rate of knots. … publisher offerings can look monastic and parochial by comparison. […] It looks rather like the new scholarly world order.” […] “Much depends on whether ECRs [early-career-researchers] take their millennial beliefs in sharing, openness, and transparency into leadership positions. [and if] publishers [start] feeding ResearchGate rather than competing with it – [making it] a publishing Amazon”.

The Update is by the team doing an industry-supported three-year cohort study of search and similar practices. Their first two reports are Early Career Researchers: the harbingers of change? Year One 2016 and now also the Year Two 2017 report, both free and public at the same website. Apparently the cohort of around 100+ is all science and social studies.

Also fairly new, and related, “ResearchGate and Academia.edu as networked socio-technical systems for scholarly communication: a literature review” (OA), in the Research in Learning Technology journal, 20th February 2018…

“a thorough understanding is still lacking of how these sites operate as networked socio-technical systems reshaping scholarly practices and academic identity. This article analyses 39 empirical studies published in peer-reviewed journals with a specific focus on ResearchGate and Academia.edu.”

Google Search currently suggests circa 72-million full-text PDFs at ResearchGate, although given the above Industry Update statement on ‘the 15m members’ we can probably assume some 10m of those PDFs are just CVs (which are nearly all excluded from JURN, by the way). Remove other fluff and I guess there might be circa 50m proper papers there. It would then be interesting to work out what “the uniques” are, by removing the papers freely available elsewhere in repositories and OA journals and suchlike. I’d very roughly guess that including ResearchGate PDFs in JURN may bring in some 5m to 8m papers not found elsewhere.

NOA : Scientific Image Search

NOA : Scientific Image Search. A project currently indexing 2.7 million free-to-use scientific images, extracted from CC-BY sources along with metadata and links. As you’d expect, ncbi.nlm.nih.gov dominates the URL links. I searched for European Lynx and had good results (big kitties), though nothing high-res.

The extracted images and their data are also being copied over to Wikimedia, where Google Images will pick them up after a while — and offer high-res filters.

Incidentally, ncbi.nlm.nih.gov has its own public and official Open-i Biomedical Image Search Engine. A search for European Lynx shows it is indeed strictly biomedical.

Searching for Recent Anthropology and Archaeology Publications

“Searching for Recent Anthropology and Archaeology Publications”, a frank new paper in the ANSS Currents (Anthropology Section of the American Library Assoc.) Spring 2018 issue. The authors examined the apparently rather severe shortcomings of commercial anthropology databases such as Anthropology Plus (EBSCO), when used to try to find recent 2013-2017 faculty papers/chapters needed to support undergraduate essay research.

While Berkeley anthropologists are prolific and well-known, their works remain hidden even in a systematic search.

Google’s Talk to Books

Talk to Books is a new Google service that tries to show book snippets directly relevant to your well-formulated query question.

I rather unfairly tried it with a fiendish question: When did J.R.R. Tolkien discover the word earendel? (without quote marks). None of the results were accurate, in contrast to Google Books where the top three results were accurate / useful / authoritative, as was the seventh result. Not only that, but the snippets were also more or less spot on.

It’s a tricky question, not only because lower-case earendel is Anglo-Saxon. There’s that use, and then there’s also the capitalised name Eärendil. Which is the name of the character Tolkien developed, after being inspired by the Anglo-Saxon word and its very complex clusters of meanings and associations. The other problem is that no-one knows exactly when in the first half of 1913 he found the word, and exactly where he found it — in a dictionary, a commentary or a footnote, or was he told about it by a tutor at Exeter College (he was having personal tuition with some of the great names in word-lore), or was his first encounter with the word while actually reading Crist in Old English? The word is the key root-hole for his work, from which the seed of his great legendarium later arose.

So, kudos to Google Books for getting it right in a useful way. Google’s Talk to Books on the other hand seems to have semantically smushed the words and ignored earendel. The name-authority was accurate, but it seemed to assume I just wanted something about Tolkien and his use of words in general, and tried a scattergun approach…

1. His fictional use of dwarf-names in the Icelandic Dvergatal (‘Dwarf table’), found in the Voluspa.
2. His early work on writing entries for the Oxford English Dictionary.
2. His mid-career attitude to the Celtic languages.
4. His entry for “Walrus” in the Oxford English Dictionary.
5. His early and reluctant abandonment of the worn-out word ‘fairy’ in his early poetry and invented-languages, in favour of ‘elf’.

There was no connection made between earendel and Eärendil, which suggests that perhaps Talk to Books might usefully add a semantic sub-system devoted to character-names, and their variants and mis-spellings?

‘Discoverability of award-winning undergraduate research in history’

New paper: “The discoverability of award-winning undergraduate research in history: Implications for academic libraries”, College & Undergraduate Libraries, April 2018…

“eight of the fifteen papers could be found in full text. If full text was available somewhere, Google always found it. Google Scholar only found four of the eight full-text papers […] Microsoft Academic found two of the full-text papers”

Lens.org

Lens Scholarly Search, a new tool to search across patents and citations at the cutting-edge of innovative science and engineering. Looks great, with nice clean design and fast response. It’s one of the new wave of citation search tools.

It’s public, and can be used without an account sign-in, unlike Sparrho (which claims 60m across both citations and patents).

I can’t see any way to filter the search results for “… and has link to free public full-text”. But I guess if you need a focussed tool like this, then your innovative project has the funding to access everything that you need to read.

Searches can be embedded in URLs, as can the ‘search by date’ setting. Which means that saving a set of bookmarks would give you a usefully quick way of regularly horizon-scanning across the developed applications and commercialisation of a specific research topic. I don’t see that Lens.org has the capability to offer a RSS alerts-type feed, based on keywords, though it looks like it may do if you sign up for an account. Of course, on highly sensitive projects, such an account has dangers — in that you don’t know if competitor nations might be sniffing at or profiling your search-trail in some way.