“Is the Open Access discoverability problem solvable?

A new Medium article, from the head of Ingenta Connect, “Is the Open Access discoverability problem solvable? And whose problem is it?”. It’s a cursory look at the problem, but even then it’s interesting for what it doesn’t say…

* For “institutional librarians” the author seems to imply that their future role is only to be in one-to-one “mentoring and facilitation” of researchers. No mention of anything else, like the big publishers working with librarians to craft and adopt universal OA-status tagging code for discoverability.

* For “scholarly authors” he only suggests academics might become marketeers for their own papers. Frankly, this seems like a waste of their valuable time. Given the salaries that full-time research academics get, they can afford to hire a virtual assistant. To promote four or five papers a year outside of one’s own disciplinary niche, simply go to UpWork (or similar) and hire your personal marketeer at $180 a paper (to get someone of quality, for a day and-a-half of work). One could probably find a way to write the $900 bill off against tax each year. Of course that assumes one is publishing something worth reading, rather than academic shovel-ware intended to tick boxes inside one’s own institution.

* For the big “publishers” the article vaguely suggests they need to embrace openness. Though perhaps only in order to capture it for their own purposes, via a… “drawing-together of all the dispersed OA content silos into one place”. Well, for their own limited set of OA content, the big publishers can solve that on Monday morning if they really want it. They just have to allow the seemingly-stalled Paperity to import the OA-only article feeds of Elsevier, Brill, Degruyter, Wiley and others, so that Paperity has full coverage of all OA articles from the big publishers.

doai.io

A new OA tool from the French, doai.io. If you’ve found a live DOI Web link that can only take you to a paywall article, then replacing http://dx.doi.org/ with http://doai.io/ will get a URL that tries to find a free version via BASE.

BASE is only middling for finding open access articles. It currently has 3.1m OA journal articles in English, with those being overwhelmingly in science, technology and medicine…

… but it’s reported that doai.io now also looks for the article posted on ResearchGate.

The doai.io coding was completed back in November and it’s only just gone public, so it’s early days. They don’t yet have a Web browser add-on that will automate the fallback from dx.doi.org to doai.io. One has to wonder if the same add-on, which would presumably be open sourced, would be quickly forked to also serve Sci-Hub (which at present only has a Chrome add-on, and no Firefox add-on).

Making Sense of the Flood

An interesting discussion on UI and navigation for academic content discovery, from the recent “The Researcher to Reader” conference (London, Feb 2016): “Making Sense of the Flood: ways to curate content and adapt search to deliver serendipity in discovery” and the following Q&A.

That Google moment…

Byron Russell, manager of Ingentaconnect, wants to search only for freely re-usable Open Access articles, but finds that ‘the Google moment’ for such a search hasn’t arrived yet…

Run a Google search on “Mendelian dominance open access” and the first two hits are for one publisher – the OMICS Group.

Judging from my Google Search results to recreate his search, what he actually tried to search for was: Mendelian dominance open access — without the quote marks. Difficult to see how such a loose search would find something worth having. But even if he’d then gone on to say… ‘so, we need to teach students how to search Google properly…’, his article’s point would have been much the same. Even using sophisticated Google search methods, one still gets mired amid a swamp of Powerpoints, K-12 lesson plans, student quizzes, wikis, high-ranking predatory journal articles and other junk.

JURN does a fairly good job with…

     Mendel “dominance” “Commons Attribution” -noncommercial

Having Mendel without quote marks in that way, catches Mendel | Mendel’s | Mendelian | since Google automatically expands the name.

The target CC content, as currently found on OA journals via JURN, seems to reside almost entirely in PLOS, Pubmed, Springer and a few others.

But there’s more in the hybrid journals. So one can also approximate a main Google Search across the large publishers, Elsevier for instance, via something like…

     site:www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/ “Commons Attribution” -noncommercial -“non-commercial”

For Oxford Journals it’s slightly different…

     inurl:oxfordjournals.org “Commons Attribution” -“non-commercial”

(Google will probably flash up an annoying “captcha” to make sure you’re not a robot, at that point, if you’ve worked the examples down to this point).

And so on… one could just work through the larger publishers that way. For Springer most of the work has already been done by Paperity, although Paperity still lacks coverage of a couple of OA Springer titles.

It’s certainly not ideal, as Russell suggests. On the other hand, one might ask why someone needs to find just the CC-BY content on a topic. Perhaps it’s actually quite useful that a big publisher would find it difficult to automatically siphon all known CC-BY articles and books into its own giant repository, slap on some search, mining, overlay journal and themed book-compiling tools, and then sell access to it.

Hypothes.is

Hypothes.is lets visitors annotate your Web pages, via a pop-out sidebar filled with a Twitter-like stream of visitor comments/links.

It’s the perennial idea of re-inventing the classic footer comments box as a uniform annotation layer, something that has been tried many times over the past 20 years. Google ran such a tool for three years before closing it down. Such services tend to end up as dank wastelands filled with Viagra ads, troll spoor and link-rot.

But this time might be different. There’s a couple of somewhat workable-looking early W3C standards (more are on the way), new options for moderation and closed group working, and an impressive range of publishers and universities are now planning to discuss how social annotation might proceed for scholarship…

Our goal is that within three years, annotation can be deployed across much of scholarship.”

The ‘can’, not ‘will’, is probably because the big publishers like Elsevier et al are noticeably absent from the list of Hypothes.is academic supporters. I can’t see them liking the idea that an open commenting system is being laid over/into their content. The sidebar’s content seems to be outside the control of the page owner, so I could theoretically pitch up at an Elsevier $66 article paywall and say “there’s a free PDF of this article over at Site XYZ…”

So how does it work, at present? Imagine that someone took a Web page’s comments section from the bottom of the page, and instead put it into a standalone and uniform sidebar. Someone adding a comment also has the option to highlight a bit of text on the page, automatically hyperlinking their comment to it. Other visitors see the comments and the highlighted text. Obviously various Twitter-ish and Wiki-ish features could be added, but that’s the basic functionality.

A pop-out sidebar means that Hypothes.is can work with PDFs, and the Hypothes.is roadmap suggests that annotation of data / images / videos / ePubs could be on the way soon. So it seems Hypothes.is needs fixed browser-displayed content, located on a URL that’s never going to break — a natural fit with things like PDFs in repositories and digital libraries. But even in that relatively limited arena, who will do all the hand annotation, moderation, linkrot checking and repair need to keep such a service usable across a billion or more pages and documents? I somehow doubt that overworked and underpaid repository staff will be skipping through the library stacks with joy, at being told they must also become the herders of social media cats and the tamers of trolls.

Institutional Repositories and ‘dark deposit’

OA expert Richard Poynder has a new PDF paper on his blog “Open Access, Almost-OA, OA Policies, and Institutional Repositories”. In it he looks at how many fulltext papers are in various repositories, and explores the trend toward the dark side that involves records that state of the PDF that ‘this item is embargoed until…’ .

Poynder’s article also has details and very extensive analysis of the “Button”, sometimes seen on repository record pages, which allows one to request a fulltext copy of an embargoed repository item.

As an aside, he notes…

a suspicion I have long had that repository managers are depositing a lot of historical data.”

Yup, I can confirm that feeling. Not all, of course, but a few do have a lot of historical material jumbled in. I guess that may be because they only have funds and staff to run one repository, which then has to hold everything. Only a few large universities sensibly split their repositories into separate servers/URLs, thus:

* a slimline one for public access to theses and masters dissertations.

* one to capture the flow of all the public-access scholarly OA items, sometimes even with filters that can knock out preprints, conference papers, or which can focus only on papers from individual journal titles.

* plus a more conventionally rambling repository to hold the digitisation of pre-1960s content, image collections, university ephemera, and the ‘local interest’ collections such as newspapers and trade magazines. Sometimes this has a slick public-friendly ‘showcase’ front-end, sometimes it’s just a list browse.

* big U.S. law schools increasingly have their own separate repositories, and their own OJS server for their journals.

* and running alongside all those, an OJS installation to run the university’s current journals (some universities even split their mainstream academic journals from the graduate school / undergraduate / creative writing / alumni magazine titles, having the latter on a second OJS installation).

It’s my feeling that even smaller universities may soon have to adopt such splitting strategies, given the tidal wave of OA content that’s looming on the horizon.

When servers do get split up like this there’s often no public interlinking between them, even in terms of using the front page of each as a platform to publicise the existence of the others.

Dissemin

Have you spotted an academic who is supposed to have made their work OA, but who hasn’t done so? Dissemin checks their OA status, and provides a way to upload their papers to the Zenodo repository (CERN’s data repository).

Placing text

A fascinating and very clearly written April 2015 article about automatically mining geolocation points out of plain text: “Mapping Words: Lessons Learned From a Decade of Exploring the Geography of Text”…

In Fall 2014 I collaborated with the US Army to create the first large-scale map of the geography of academic literature and the open web, geocoding more than 21 billion words of academic literature spanning the entire contents of JSTOR, DTIC, CORE, CiteSeerX, and the Internet Archive’s 1.6 billion PDFs relating to Africa and the Middle East, as well as a second project creating the first large-scale map of human rights reports. A key focus of this project was the ability to infuse geographic search into academic literature…”

We probably need a name for such activities, and also for mining eco/geo data out of old paintings and photographs of landscapes. Geo-mining is too 20th century and eco-unfriendly. Geo-gleaning and Geo-gleaner are terms that have a certain poetry about them, while also suggesting both the curatorial and the imprecise nature of the techniques.

JISC benchmarking tool for OA in the UK

A handy benchmarking tool for OA in the UK…

CIAO is a benchmarking tool for assessing institutional readiness for Open Access (OA) compliance … produced as part of the JISC OA Pathfinder…”

Looks good, but omits the utterly vital element of ‘Public, Peer and Government Discovery’. I’d suggest adding an extra strip with the following wording/steps…

ENVISIONING: We do not know what proportion of our OA repository contents can be found via public search-engines, or the quality of the search results that link to our repository.

DISCOVERING: We are considering the most effective steps to improve our repository coverage in public search-engines, and are taking advantage of guides and free consultancy work offered by staff at major search engines such as Google. We will rank the priority of these steps by both their likely impact on discoverability and ease of implementation.

DESIGNING & PILOTING: We have committed funds to implement and test at least ten commonly recommended methods that will increase our repository’s coverage in the public search-engines. Graduate interns have been recruited to aid the repository staff during this period.

ROLLING OUT: The planned measures have been turned on or implemented. Systems and staff are in place, and best practice workflows have been clearly documented and disseminated. Search engine indexing of our repository content is being tested to gather reliable metrics on: increased indexing coverage; time to index new content; and search result quality. We are also internally monitoring visitor traffic and open/dwell rates.

EMBEDDING: We are examining further measures to boost the quality of the public search results for our repository content, such as ensuring that the document title is used in the results Web link. We are considering acquiring funds to undertake certain large-scale measures once deemed too expensive to implement, such as retrospectively re-working the university-branded cover-pages applied to our PDFs. Senior staff have recognized that Web traffic to our OA repository represents a valuable branding, outreach and recruitment opportunity. The repository is no longer seen as drain on resources or as general-use web storage for the university.

Open Repositories 2015: the videos

Videos of all presentations at Open Repositories 2015 (June 2015). Including a one hour keynote on bot indexing of repositories, from Anurag Acharya, the maker of Google Scholar. Audio in .mp3 (36Mb) | Slides in .pdf.

Google experiment indexes images from PDFs

Google indexes images from PDF files. Fairly limited at present, possibly because the pictures all seem to be drawn from a small set of 500 PDFs stored at http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/. But I’d guess that, as Google’s machine-learning algorithms get tuned up on this, we may start to see the service expanded to extract and serve images from wild PDFs. I wonder if there will be a Creative Commons filter for images from open access research PDFs? I also wonder if this may enhance the size of the image pool accessible via JURN’s new Image Search feature?

[ Hat-tip: ResearchBuzz ]

Repozitar

Repozitar is a unified search tool for Czech open repositories. By default their keyword search only returns records which offer full-text. A nice touch, and it makes one wonder why the English-speaking world’s repository search tools seem to have such trouble offering this simple useful feature.

Repozitar is associated with a searchable nationwide registry of Czech theses, seemingly part of a Masaryk University project to help detect plagiarism in theses and student papers. English abstracts appear to be common in the very detailed record pages.

Reference rot

“Reference rot in web-based scholarly communication”…

“[In a sample of] 3.5 million scholarly articles published between 1997 and 2012 [there is an] alarming link rot ratio for all three corpora: 13% of arXiv, 22% of Elsevier, and 14% of PMC articles published in 2012 suffer from link rot. These numbers only increase for older articles, for example, for articles published in 2005 the corresponding numbers are 18%, 41%, and 36%.”

SciNet

Lots of press chatter in the last few days about a not-yet-public new academic search engine from Helsinki Institute for Information Technology called SciNet. It seems it’s been in development for some years. Here’s a screen capture of the UI sliders seen briefly in the video…

I seem vaguely to remember similar style experimental search interfaces, maybe ten years ago now.

But the sliders made me think I’d like to see Google offer such a set of fine-tuning sliders, to change a variety of their currently fixed or on/off search parameters. Although I guess that might then be gamed by the SEO hucksters to winkle out a few of the secrets of Google’s algorithm weightings.

Bing Insights

A new embedded search tool for non-fiction writers, Bing Insights for MS Office. It only seems to work in MS Office Live, rather than as a plugin for older desktop installations of Office. Sadly I just couldn’t find the Insights feature at all in Office Live, when I went to test it. So perhaps it’s not yet been rolled out the UK.

But it seems a neat idea, meaning that checking a basic fact no longer entails bouncing out of Word and into a Web browser. The search process also apparently inherits semantic nudges, drawn from the other words and phrases detected in the document. One wonders if the semantic data that Microsoft gain from this will, in time, improve the Bing Search service itself.

I’d expect the Open Source Office software suites to add this sort of fact-checking feature to their Word Processor soon, if they haven’t already (I couldn’t immediately find something similar for Open Office, LibreOffice, etc). Although their natural choice of partner, Wikipedia, might not be the most trustworthy source of facts.

1,200 U.S. librarians surveyed on Web assessment skills

A key element of online search literacy appears to be going backward, rather than forward. Results from 1,200 U.S. librarians surveyed in May 2014 appear to show a …

… 29.3 percent increase, over the past two years, in the perception that students have a rudimentary understanding of web evaluation. “[…] librarians feel students are now using the open web for research less than they did in 2012,” the report says, “[and] when students are on the open web, their evaluation skills are more lackluster.” […] 36.1 percent of the students surveyed felt that they had an advanced understanding of website evaluation, whereas only two percent of librarians considered their students to have a high degree of skill in the same area.”

The respondents were librarians from across the core educational spectrum, from elementary through to four-year academic institutions. 31 percent were based in high schools.

Scholar Ninja

Scholar Ninja, new from Jure Triglav…

I’ve started building a distributed search engine for scholarly literature. … What makes Scholar Ninja unique is that all of its functions (indexing, searching, and distributed server) are contained within a browser extension. [and thus hardened against censorship] “What?”, I can hear you say, “How can that be? Since when can a browser be a server?” Since 3 years ago, when the almighty WebRTC was born. … [Scholar Ninja] is completely contained within a browser extension: install it from the Chrome Web Store. … beware that this is alpha software and may break completely.

Few withdrawals from the World Bank

Why we need both discoverability and long Plain English summaries (as well as short abstracts) for open academic work… “The solutions to all our problems may be buried in PDFs that nobody reads”. Admittedly, we are talking about World Bank reports, but in the ‘send a Congressman to sleep’ stakes I guess those can go head-to-head with many other academic papers.

GeoDeepDive

GeoDeepDive is software that helps…

geo-scientists extract data that is buried in the text, tables, and figures of journal articles and web sites […] As of today, GeoDeepDive has processed over 36K research papers and 134K web pages

Jisc: Action on discoverability

David Prosser at Jisc blogs on the need for action on discoverability…

… 40% of researchers kicked off their project with a trawl through the Internet for material, while only 2% preferred to make a visit to a physical library space. [yet] nearly half of all items within digitised collections are not discoverable via major search engines by their name or title [and, even worse] digitised collections become harder and harder to find over time, for a variety of complex reasons.