Beall’s List

The JURN blog’s sidebar is now linking to both versions of “Beall’s List” of predatory and questionable publishers. The currently updated list, and the old list available via Archive.org.

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CORE at 9m

Updated figures on the full-text stored at CORE, today.

CORE is now stated as locally holding 9m OA items in full-text, with 1.83m of those said to be newly-added full-text OA articles extracted from “Elsevier, Springer, Frontiers and PLoS”. Interestingly, the 9m total is described as being made up of both “full-text articles” and other “research outputs”. As such it would be useful to have a pie-chart of the relative proportions. What proportion of the headline 9m are “research outputs” in a form other than full-text articles, and what types predominate among those “research outputs”?

Update: two weeks later at the end of the December the final figures were tallied, and CORE’s blog announced a total of 10.03m in “full text” for 2018…

Another splash from Unsplash

Six months on, here’s another haul of my picks from the Unsplash CC0 Creative Commons collection, with batch reduction to manageable sizes. My previous picks were on themes of libraries and archives and the creative industries. Below is another round of creative industries pictures. Credits are embedded in the file-names…

Journalism:

Traditional folk culture performance:

Bugler / marching band:

Clay crafts:

Brush calligraphy:

Pen monitor (paint on the screen):

UI design:

Fine tailoring:

Composing classical music:

Performing classical music:

Live music:

Hand-carved wood design:

Archival work:

Free speech:

Lacking: people engaged in comic-book page production / hand-on-screen re: painting on pen monitors / field-recordings for radio production.

Sci-hub silenced?

I did a quick check of Sci-hub, three weeks after they lost their sci-hub.io DNS name. It does appear to be totally dead now — in that the fallback TOR Onion address is 404-not-found today, and their two non-DNS URLs are also dead (in terms of still having a viable front-page, but being unable to handle any DOI article-fetch requests).

“Guide to academic search” – updated

JURN’s page “Guide to academic search” has been checked for linkrot and updated.

Boosterism

Why would anyone have a Facebook Page rather than a Group? On a Page, Facebook just holds many of your posts to ransom. It limits your audience reach, unless you pay up hard cash to “boost” the post. I don’t run any FB Pages, but I do some admin on one Page, and it’s very annoying when this happens repeatedly on non-commercial posts telling people about things like local art exhibitions…

The “you’ll show it to more people” translates as “we’ll show it to more people”. It’s a protection racket for user-generated content, in effect.

Warning: X-ray visions

Just a warning to picture librarians and magazine editors, about ‘x-ray delta one’ on Flickr. He’s now posted nearly 18,000 pictures there in high-res, mostly science-fiction and fantasy. It all gets placed under his default Creative Commons catch-all. I’ve been aware of him for a few years now, and he appears to make little distinction between genuine public domain (of which there is, admittedly, quite a lot now) and material where the IP and copyrights still belong to big studios with big lawyers.

For instance, claimed as Creative Commons just this week: a scan of a frame by Jack Kirby, one of the world’s best known comics artists, from the Marvel Comics 1977 adaptation of MGM’s classic 2001 movie…

Sumatra PDF – launch in magazine mode with no gutters

I’ve waved goodbye to the Foxit Reader software on Windows. Foxit had added one to many nags, extra bits of unwanted ‘extra’ software such as its Connected module, and generally felt like it was headed toward more and more bloat. Then there was the recent security glitch which still isn’t patched.

I’m now using the freeware Sumatra PDF instead, with its Book view (Cover page + Facing pages) for magazines and books. This view mode is found under Settings | View | Book View. Super-quick launch and very smooth page-turn.

You can set Sumatra PDF to always launch in Book mode by editing the Advanced settings list. Find:

DefaultDisplayMode = automatic

and change this to…

DefaultDisplayMode = book view

The other initial drawback appears to be a slight sliver of gutter between double-page spreads, which spoils magazine spreads in art / architecture / fashion etc magazines. This can also be fixed in the Advanced settings. Find:

PageSpacing = 4 4

and change this to…

PageSpacing = 0 0

It also has an ugly icon for PDF documents, in a garish yellow. To change this on Windows 8.1.x use the freeware FileTypesMan. Scroll to the .pdf setting, and double-click it. From there you can assign a new icon for PDFs.

“Automated book index making” post – updated

I’ve updated and expanded my Christmas 2016 post “A survey of automated book index making software”. New bits…

PDF Index Generator 2.4 tested, specifically its very useful new “capitalized phrases only” automated query-filter which allows you to grab only personal names and longer place names, with a short tutorial on finding and using this feature…

More tips on Java security, re: the security nightmare that is Java being needed to run PDF Index Generator.

Also, the genuine freeware Index Generator 5.5 has just updated to 5.8, adding new features such as a “word list import and export feature” and “index support for alphanumerical words”.

Lost in the Amazon

I see that Amazon UK is now defaulting to a really dumb wide-spectrum search, when one clicks on the author-name link on a book page. For instance, a click-search for the Tolkien scholar J. S. Ryan plunges one into quack-pot ‘health cure’ books and trash sci-fi trilogies by similarly-named authors. It’s done on the basis of ‘confusion marketing’ I guess.

The spectrum gets extremely wide half way down the results page, when it seems that any author with “J. S.” in the name is being shovelled in.

The U.S. version of Amazon appears to have the same name-authority problem on search. For now, one can instead manually paste-search for “J. S. Ryan”, which does give correct results. But that’s not going to be much use for someone with a less distinctive name.

This new problem comes on top of Amazon’s foul new practice of lumping all book reviews for a book title under all editions of that book. Thus, for instance, one arrives at the page for a critical edition of a classic work but reads a peeved review of a cheap shovel-ware reprint ebook of the same title.