The Finnish National Gallery under CC0

10,000 pictures from the Finnish National Gallery, newly online under CC0 Creative Commons.

Not all have preview thumbnails, but those that didn’t have one still gave me the picture as a high-res download. DPI on my test samples varied from 96 to 300. Most pictures, with a bit of adjustment, would be usable in a magazine. A few of my test samples looked visually as if they were quite highly compressed in JPEG, despite their file-size. Either that or the camera’s focus is not always as crisp on the picture surface as it might be. But possibly that’s done on the principle that users would rather sharpen in Photoshop than try to unsharpen.

Picture: “Girl from the Islands” (1929) by Helene Schjerfbeck.

http://www.europeana.eu obviously can’t be relied on the pick up all public domain items at the Gallery. Because a Google Images search for site:kokoelmat.fng.fi keyword found several “cat” images marked ‘Public Domain CC0’ that Europeana couldn’t find. Possibly that’s a result of Google’s A.I. automatically identifying what’s in a picture, and not relying only on metadata.

Advertisements

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.

Open access resources for medieval manuscripts

The digitized medieval manuscript: open access resources, a big up-to-date survey, annotated and linked.

To be continued… The Australian Newspaper Fiction Database

To be continued… The Australian Newspaper Fiction Database is excavating a wealth of fiction from the scans of pages of Australian newspapers. Interesting, but I must say that it has a search interface that only a librarian could love, and my search for “Rosaleen Norton” or Rosaleen Norton on the author field both threw up fatal database-error messages. An alternative search in the “Publication Author” field of the item grid, for Norton, worked but had no results.

As a wider test of what’s been digitised in Australia I went instead to Trove – Newspapers – Advanced Search and searched for “Rosaleen Norton”. She was a notorious occult/horror artist subject to an art censorship court trial in the early 1950s, and who as a girl had three H.P. Lovecraft-style macabre stories published in the popular Smith’s Weekly newspaper (Sydney, 1919 to 1950). She may possibly have been one of Lovecraft’s late postal correspondents, evidenced by some strong internal stylistic evidence and her story “The Painted Horror” strongly resembling Lovecraft’s lost juvenile tale “The Picture” (1907). He was known to send this story out at this time, for teenage authors to work over and learn from.

Excellent results were had with Trove. The accounts of the controversy and her trial show up in the 1950s. And two of her stories were available as scans and with original illustrations to boot. Though sadly the often-fragile UK-Australia Internet connection died before I could search for her third story, or see if there were other stories as yet unfound.

New book: Harnessing the Power of Google

I see that I missed the publication of a new book about Google Search. Harnessing the Power of Google: What Every Researcher Should Know was released in summer 2017, when I wasn’t paying much attention to news. It’s a short primer of 150 pages and the contents list looks very encouraging. These contents seem to chime with a blog review and an Amazon review, which both suggest the book is aimed at… “librarians who will be working with researchers”. Implying researchers of the type who will expect to be working with expert Google users rather than Google-phobics.

It’s possible to peer inside the book via Google Books. Sadly this shows that the book doesn’t mention the rich possibilities of Google Custom Search, as a keyword search of the text shows no results for either “custom search” or “CSE”.

It appears that the book has yet to receive any open/public reviews from librarians. But the business researcher blog Infonista has a polished and informative review.

Delhi Declaration on Open Access

An apparently new Delhi Declaration on Open Access…

“The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists only 200 out of the 20,000+ journals being published from India.”

Yes, that’s correct. I downloaded the DOAJ .CSV, sorted by Country. There are indeed currently 201 journals in the DOAJ with a country identifier “India”.

At November 2013 the DOAJ figure for “India” was 598, so presumably a great many Indian-published OA titles went during ‘the great purging’ at DOAJ.

But the Declaration’s “20,000+ journals being published from India” can’t all be Open Access. Presumably by “20,000+” the authors are talking about all journals, of all types. Thus it might have been better and fairer to DOAJ if the Declaration had been rather more precise, by comparing the 200 DOAJ-listed OA journals to the total number of known non-predatory OA journals published from India.

---

Update:

An India and Pakistan study of “open access journals indexed by Scopus up to Oct 2017” found that the “major share of journals are from India, which contributes 593 Journals in which only 218 (37%) journals are currently active” (Akhoon and Ganaie, “Status of Open Access: Across Borders”, 2018).

Getty kills Google Image’s ‘View image’ button: how to fix it

Under pressure from commercial image library Getty, Google Images has removed a key button from its search results. It’s the “View Image” button, which allowed people to view an image in isolation, against whatever colour they have set as a background for the Web browser.

The removal is easily fixed with a simple new script:

Firefox: Google Images Fix for Greasemonkey.

Chrome and Chrome-compatible: Google Search "View Image" Button

If you also want to change the default background colour (white can be better for screen-shots of logos for Facebook posts, to get an edge), in Firefox you can change the Web browser’s default background from black thus: Tools | Options | Content | Colours | Background | OK.

There are also press reports that the “search by image” icon in the Google Images search box is to be removed, also due to Getty pressure. But I see it’s still there on the UK version of Google Images.

Massive Bronze figure unearthed

“The state of OA: a large-scale analysis of the prevalence and impact of Open Access articles” (Feb 2018, PeerJ)…

“the most common mechanism for OA is not Gold, Green, or Hybrid OA, but rather an under-discussed category we dub Bronze: articles made free-to-read on the publisher website, without an explicit Open license.”

Of Bronze, “few studies have highlighted its role” [in OA]. “We manually inspected a small sample of Bronze articles in order to understand this subcategory more; we found that while many Bronze articles were Delayed OA from toll-access publishers, nearly half were hosted on journals that published 100% of content as free-to-read but were not listed on the DOAJ and did not formally license content (using CC-BY or any other license).”

Bronze was found to be at a whopping 47% of OA, from a one-week sample of Unpaywall-DOIs in 2017.

BBC Weather: a chance of probabilities

The BBC Weather forecast page has changed. It’s slightly clunkier now, in terms of graphic elegance. Certainly a move away from the near-perfect design they had before. But there are new features, as trade-offs. Presumably the change is because the promised new supercomputers are now online, as so we get a nine-day default view rather than the previous five-day default view. They’ve also added a new unlabelled “Chance of precipitation” (meaning, rain) icon down the bottom just above the wind speed and direction…

To the 95% of the population who don’t understand probabilities, and are anyway not able to meaningfully apply them within the highly variable system that is the British weather, that new additional icon is probably unwanted. Also, why show a visual icon of rain when it’s not at all likely to happen? It’s a form of pessimistic “fake news”, done in the language of graphic design.

If you want to remove these “Chance of precipitation” icons, here’s how to do it in Firefox. I’m assuming you have AdblockPlus installed and its Element Hiding Helper add-on, which only work properly in FF55 or lower. In Adblock go to: Filter Preferences | Element Hiding Rules | Add filter. Add the following new rule…

bbc.co.uk##[class*="wr-time-slot-primary__precipitation wr-time-slot-primary__precipitation--grey gel-brevier"]

This removes the grey “low” probability icons…

If you also want the blue “low-medium” probability icons gone, then add the following rule…

bbc.co.uk##[class*="wr-time-slot-primary__precipitation wr-time-slot-primary__precipitation--blue gel-brevier"]

Even after this blocking, you can always click on an hour-slice and you get a slide-out which gives a more sensible type of “Chance of precipitation”…

The gradations here are far more simple: Low chance | Chance | High chance. That’s good enough for me, as I don’t need to be constantly juggling with fine percentage gradations of an hourly probability of rain. We’re a damp nation and the ever-changing weather in a specific locality is complicated enough as it is.

Here’s what the BBC Weather’s new nine-day hourly forecast looks like, after fixing…

Regular users will probably also want to block the new animated tickers, the huge and ugly new satellite map that loads under the bottom of the page, and other page-junk, in order to speed up loading.

“Utility of primary scientific literature to environmental managers”

“Utility of primary scientific literature to environmental managers: an international case study on coral-dominated marine protected areas” (preprint, Nov 2017)…

“To assess accessibility of MPA science to decision-makers we conducted a literature search using the database SCOPUS … limiting our search to all ‘articles’ and ‘reviews’ published between 1 January 2009 and 31 December 2012. … only 43% of primary scientific articles and 50% of review papers relating to coral dominated MPAs [marine protected areas] were freely accessible to decision makers.”

Although keep in mind here that SCOPUS only has 29.18% coverage of the DOAJ Open Access titles, so is not likely to do well on many types of OA indexing test.