Mind the Gap

MIT’s Mind the Gap is a new comprehensive survey report on open source publishing systems that can be used for scholarly purposes. The only one I can see that’s missing is WordPress. Which is open source, free, easy to use and rent a server for, and can be quickly tooled-up with plugins for such purposes. In fact, it’s not even mentioned once, even to explain why it and its plugins were omitted.

How to: Google Search in columns at Summer 2019

There’s now a temporary sort-of fix for the badly broken GoogleMonkeyR browser userscript, the fix being kindly made by IzzySoft. My thanks to IzzySoft, but it still has numerous problems and also doesn’t work at all with News results. One of the worst problems is that results can get ‘sliced’ across columns, with one bit of a result at the foot of column one, and the other bit at the top of column two. It also doesn’t work well with Google Hit Hider by Domain.

For now then, I suggest that someone wanting three-column Google Search and Google Books, on a widescreen desktop PC, should abandon GoogleMonkeyR. Instead try the following, to get Google Search looking like this…

1. Disable any installs of GoogleMonkeyR.

2. Get the Stylus extension. This is a host that enables quick makeovers of the style of a website, via simple style scripts.

3. Then install the Stylus style “Google Search in columns”, after first setting “3” columns in the download options. I could not get four columns to look or feel good.

4. I tried some Google Search makeover Styles, but none could colour the link title and URL separately. I’ve learned to instantly ‘read the URLs’ over the years, and thus want them clearly identifiable at the merest glance. For a fully configurable colours makeover I went to the Dark Theme for Google Chrome addon, which can do such things and which seems robust and updated.

5. Tweak the colours in this Dark Theme addon. It’s fully configurable, inc. in my Opera browser, and you access its options via right-clicking its icon.

This gives you easy ways to set the colours, and you can even set a timer so the dark mode only kicks in at dusk and turns off at dawn.

There’s also a custom .CSS injector which looks interesting, and I’ll tinker with it at some point.

6. Now you want to tell Google to deliver only 9 results per page, by using an access URL with a command embedded in it that limits the number of results. 9 results suits a three column layout, and (once you get rid of other clutter), means you usually don’t have to scroll down to find the “next page” controls.

https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&complete=0&tbo=1&num=9&tbs=li:1

num=9 is what’s switching you from 10 to 9 results.

7. Finally you use the popular UBlock addon and its Element Picker to perma-block page clutter, as it appears in the Google Search results to mess up your layout. Such as huge slabs of video suggestions, instant answers, and other distracting and often irrelevant auto-fluff. There’s a bit of an art to such blocking, but you’ll get the hang of it. Just keep at it until all you’re getting is what you want — just the actual search results.

8. Here’s what my Google Search looks like on a desktop PC, with this setup.

Google Search. Everything ‘at a glance’, suited to a desktop widescreen, and with all URLs and controls clearly visible. Only the Google Books switch-through link is behind a dropdown menu, but at some point I’ll find a fix to replace “Shopping” with “Books” on the menu.

Google Books.

Nothing seems to budge Google News, in terms of getting results into columns, unfortunately. GoogleMonkeyR used to do that, but it no longer works and the new fix doesn’t do it. Nothing else seems to work on it.

As you’ll see above I use the UserScript “Google Search Sidebar” to get the neat sidebar, JURN in a UserScript to inject a quick search-query passing link into the Google menu. I also use uBlock to block the distracting book-cover thumbnails on Google Books.

I also run Google HitHider by Domain. Which in some cases means results look like this…

The spaces are results from blocked domains, being elegant replaced with a blank block where the result would have appeared, and thus not spoiling the layout.

A new thesis partly on OA and Google Scholar

Generacion de herramientas de evaluacion bibliometrica a partir de Google Scholar, a newly public thesis for the Universidad de Granada, 2019. The focus appears to be on data obtained in 2014.

* Chapter 9. Journal Scholar Metrics: building an Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences journal ranking with Google Scholar data.

* Chapter 16. Evidence of Open Access of scientific publications in Google Scholar: a large-scale analysis.

OA journals in the Nordic countries

Open access journal publishing in the Nordic countries, Learned Publishing, March 2019.

There have been no previous comprehensive studies about OA journals in the Nordic countries.” [using a good variety of sources] “437 scholarly OA journals published in the five Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) were identified, and some key characteristics were studied. Of these, only 184 were indexed in DOAJ. Social sciences and humanities dominated as topics, and few journals charge authors.

The Future of Search

Mindshare UK’s The Future of Search (full report, free in public PDF) for those who use smartphones in the UK…

we tracked people’s search behaviour using ethnography, face-to-face workshops and neuroscience experiments surveying 1,800 UK smartphone users.

LibGen Desktop catalogue

Want to know what’s in the LibGen catalogue? There’s now a Desktop software version of the catalogue…

have your own offline copy of the LG catalog!

New paper: Blacklists and Whitelists To Tackle Predatory Publishing

New and public on mBio, “Blacklists and Whitelists To Tackle Predatory Publishing: a Cross-Sectional Comparison and Thematic Analysis”.

Investing in the Podcast Ecosystem

A new free Andreessen Horowitz report, “Investing in the Podcast Ecosystem in 2019”. It’s from an investor perspective, but is very long and has lots of interesting firm-ish numbers and agency segmentations of use to a wider audience interested in free public content.

It doesn’t once mention YouTube though, so it may be overlooking a lot of under-the-radar effectively-a-podcast episodic shows that can be listened to as audio-only, and others that don’t go through the usual podcast delivery channels. No mention either of the leading podcast search-engine listennotes.com which should surely have been in such a report.

Also, many of the services it mentions I’ve never heard of. Who knew that “Apple Podcasts” is apparently the incumbent? I’ve never heard of it before… but then I’m not part of the Apple ecosystem.

YouTube are restricting ‘sort by date’ again.

YouTube are once again restricting “sort by date”. They haven’t actually turned it off totally, like they did last time, but the results show it’s obviously being heavily restricted.

Finding an OpenClipart fallback

The OpenClipArt site has been down for 21 days now, apparently felled by a heavy denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. It has 150,000 bits of clipart, all under CC Zero. Archive.org has a partial mirror of the site, but it’s no use for keyword searching or (it seems) getting the actual image files.

While Wikimedia Commons holds 2,000 images tagged with ‘OpenClipArt’, they didn’t ingest all 150,000 bits of the OpenClipArt clipart. In fact, no-one seems to have done so, and there are also no recent tar.gz archives containing all 150,000 items. The 0.18 and 0.19 releases were 2010 and 2011, and while a 310Mb author-sorted 2.0 release followed, there doesn’t appear to have been a more recent 3.0 release of the archive.

Thus it seems to me that the site Public Domain Files by Open Clip Art Library is the best fallback until OpenClipArt is back up again. It has a searchable partial mirror of 13,778 OpenClipArt images files, with the latest of these dated to mid summer 2014, and the site has no Shutterstock-ery, pop-ups or ‘mailing-list blocking overlay’ nastiness that I could see (while running an ad-blocker).

Once OpenClipArt is back online it would probably be a good idea to archive and distribute a big compressed mirror of the summer 2019 contents, if only in .SVG format.