‘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

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.

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.

Google Scholar and DSpace

A new study, “Google Scholar and DSpace”…

“The average indexing ratio [in Google Scholar] for our sample of 10 recent DSpace repositories is 64.8%”

I wonder if the interface presentation has an influence? http://circle.ubc.ca/ is totally hardcore in presentation and keywording, and is indexed at 99%. Whereas http://dash.harvard.edu/ has a more student-friendly blog-like look and feel to it, and is indexed at just 26% despite the harvard.edu domain.

NISO’s Open Access Metadata draft

NISO’s Open Access Metadata and Indicators draft is out for consultation. They’ve sensibly decided against designing a set of swishy graphic icons. Their proposal now seems to be for two simple bits of XML, that will each flag up a document as being open access…

““free to read” and “license reference” metadata will be encoded in XML, and included in existing metadata distribution channels and with the content itself where appropriate.” [...] for example, in HTML META tags and in PDF files where bibliographic and other metadata are being included.”

Consultation deadline is 4th February 2014.

Perma CC

Perma CC is set to provide… “a central archive for important webpages referenced in scholarly works and legal documents”. Legal citations only, at first.

Omeka 2.0

An Omeka 2.0 Release Candidate is now available for download. Omeka is a handy WordPress-like online catalogue publishing software, designed for academics.

Among the streamlining and new features:

* creation of thumbnail images for a fuller range of files

* the availability of a new site-wide search

* addition of Dublin Core Metadata fields

Free online open course in Semantic Web Technologies

Free open online course in Semantic Web Technologies, starting on the 4th of February 2013 for six weeks.

* Limits of today’s Web, and the vision of the Semantic Web.

* Basic architecture of the Semantic Web including: URI, RDF, RDFS, SPARQL, RDFa, Microdata and Triple Stores.

* Knowledge representation and logics.

* Ontologies, Reasoning with propositional logic and first order logic, Fundamentals of description logics, and the Web Ontology Language (OWL).

* Applications in the Web of Data.

* Ontological Engineering, Knowledge Discovery, Linked Data, Semantic Search.

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?

Page Monitor for Chrome

Page Monitor is a Google Chrome browser add-on. It monitors content updates on Web pages that don’t offer RSS feeds.

Google Scholar adds metrics

Details of the new metrics that have been added to Google Scholar.

Altmetrics

Altmetrics: a manifesto…

“scholarship’s three main filters for importance are failing … new forms [now] reflect and transmit [additional forms of] scholarly impact: that dog-eared (but uncited) article that used to live on a shelf now lives in Mendeley, CiteULike, or Zotero — where we can see and count it. That hallway conversation about a recent finding has moved to blogs and social networks — now, we can listen in. The local genomics dataset has moved to an online repository — now, we can track it. This diverse group of activities forms a composite trace of impact far richer than any available before. We call the elements of this trace altmetrics.”

While some of these claims may be true of science and medical, the research suggests the humanities are rather lacking in engagement with new technologies and blogs / social media — beyond standard Web use, sharing Powerpoint slides and using services like Google Docs.

infirstpage:

A search modifier I’d like to see in Google Search…

infirstpage: (similar to the existing intitle: but it would return a result only if the keyword or phrase occurs in the first 360 words of a document)

The Five Stars of Online Journal Articles

David Shotton proposes The Five Stars of Online Journal Articles…

“I propose five factors — peer review, open access, enriched content, available datasets and machine-readable metadata — as the Five Stars of Online Journal Articles.”

From a search perspective, I might suggest we need to add another star for “Googlyness”, when all the following factors are present…

* search-engine friendliness (i.e.: make sure the article title shows up as the clickable link in search results, not something like “43w94.taryyt.indd”)

* RSS feeds for linked tables-of-contents

* embedding of the journal title and home URL in each individual PDF or HTML article page (so they can be easily tracked back, after they get casually downloaded to a hard-drive)

Bots for scholars

Some interesting new data mining projects are shortly to get underway. They’re aimed at making ‘smart’ software bots that make life easier for researchers…

* automated tracking/mapping of topic lifecycles, across all forms of scholarly discussion

* automatic identifying of common forms of argument used in different disciplines

* software to automatically generate Dewey Decimal Classification-based tags from existing repository metadata

* software to automatically generate links to texts discussing the same persons, places and events

I’d say No.3 has a good chance of success.

YaCy

YaCy, a new distributed censorship-hardened search-engine, that’s supported by the Free Software Foundation Europe. YaCy is currently saturated with traffic, as it’s only just been announced.

“Search Needs A Shake Up”

“Search Needs A Shake Up” writes Oren Etzion in an op-ad article on Nature‘s comment columns (4th Aug 2011). The under-the-hood discovery technology has not significantly progressed, even while more-or-less helpful widgets have proliferated on search pages, and search results are transformed on-the-fly to fit almost any mobile device. Most ordinary people still expect their search-engine to be a ‘magic oracle’ — ask a natural language question, and get a one-line correct answer back. Of course, that doesn’t work — which is why Yahoo Answers and its more professional imitators are so popular for those with few search skills. The problem is, the laziness of their users makes unpaid slaves of others.

But until we get that magic one question / one answer solution (Etzion outlines some research, but don’t hold your breath) how about just teaching people to search properly, ideally intensively and from primary school level onwards? It’s not rocket science. It’s no more difficult than learning the Highway Code by heart, or some basic smatterings of Spanish. Doing quality search should be as natural as basic literacy. Once the school-level training is bedded down, then refuse entry to university applicants who cannot pass a rigorous three-hour “search and find” test. The kids and their teachers will soon get the message.

JISC / University of Oxford Digital Impacts day

JISC and the University of Oxford are running a one-day meeting on 20th May 2011, Digital Impacts: How to Measure and Understand the Usage and Impact of Digital Content…

“The question of how we can measure and understand the usage and impact of digital content within the education sector is becoming increasingly important. Substantial investment goes into the creation of digital resources for research, teaching and learning and, in the current economic climate, both content creators, publishers as well as funding bodies are being asked to provide evidence of the value of the resources they’ve invested in. But how do we go about defining value and impact? Which metrics should we adopt to understand usage? When is a digital resource a well used resource?”

Growing Knowledge

Growing Knowledge, a new website and set of videos from the British Library on the future of online research knowledge…

“How have digital technologies changed research? What are the new challenges they pose? What role should a research library play in the 21st Century? Growing Knowledge at the British Library explores these questions with our researchers in order to inform the debate on the future of research.”

An accompanying exhibition at the British Library runs until 11th July 2011.

Full-text RSS Feed Builder

A neat new service, Full-text RSS Feed Builder…

“Love the ease of RSS, but hate when feeds don’t display the whole article, forcing you to click through just to read it?

Regain control by entering the URL of a feed below and clicking the submit button to receive a full-text feed URL you can use anywhere.”

Ah, now if only open arts and humanities ejournals actually had any RSS feeds… but unfortunately most don’t.