Algerian Scientific Journal Platform

Algeria now has an official Algerian Scientific Journal Platform (ASJP) aggregator for online journals (inc. humanities), all of which appear to be open. It’s from CERIST (Centre de Recherche sur l’Information Scientifique et Technique), which a little digging shows is a bona fide arm of the Algerian Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research.

New paper: Academic Web Search Engines, 2014-2016

“An Evidence-Based Review of Academic Web Search Engines, 2014-2016”… “This article seeks to summarize research concerning Google Scholar, Google Books, and Microsoft Academic from the past three years”.

Useful. Interesting snippets from this excellent new summary survey:

* Weiss noted, “no critical studies seem to exist on the effect that Google Books might have on the contemporary reference experience” (Weiss 2016, 293). […] Research is badly needed about the coverage and utility of both Google Books and Microsoft Academic.”

   Seriously? None, not one single study from 2005-2015? Wow.

* “In September 2016, Hug et al. […] noted Microsoft Academic has “grown massively from 83 million publication records in 2015 to 140 million in 2016″ […] As of February 2017 its index contains 120 million citations.”

   Great news, which means I’ll have to take another look at that. I’m overdue for doing another big ‘group test’ of OA coverage in public search-engines, so this news may spur that. Of course, “citations” are not full-text, but 120m is impressive.

* “Bonato [2016] noted Google Scholar retrieved different results with Advanced and Basic searches”

   So that’s another thing to take into account if I do another group-test this summer.

* A “glaring lack of research related to the [search] coverage of arts and humanities scholarship” [and specifically] “Little is known about coverage of arts and humanities by Google Scholar.” [and it is evident that arts and humanities scholars’] preferences and behavior […] cannot be inferred from the vast literature focused on the sciences.”

* “research concerning the use of academic web search engines by undergraduates, community college students, high school students, and other groups would be welcome.”

* “Scholar results have been said to contain “clutter””.

   This is the closest the paper comes to mentioning all the predatory journals and similar dubious items, which get dragged into Scholar by automated collection bots.

* “During interviews of 20 historians by Martin and Quan-Haase (2016) concerning serendipity, five mentioned Google Books and Google Scholar as important for recreating serendipity of the physical library online.”

   Yes, serendipity is vital. It’s more of a loosely chain-linked set of serendipity loops during search-based research, really, interspersed with deep-dives to get tiny confirming nuggets of fact (e.g.: was Borges correct when he suggested that The Time Machine‘s famous central motif of ‘the future-flower’ was almost certainly not influenced by a striking passage in Coleridge’s notebooks? Yes he was, presumably by a private letter of enquiry to some learned bibliophile in London. But he was characteristically recondite on this point in the essay, and thus can only be proved correct if you do the 30 minute deep-dive to the primary sources needed to get the exact month-of-publication dates in 1895).

* “arts and humanities scholars […] commonly expressed the belief that having a complete list of research activities online improves public awareness [with] the enormous potential for this tool’s use.”

   Might be more useful to have a rolling listing of what’s not being done, but which needs to be done. Sort of like a speculative Kickstarter, only you’d gather people rather than cash.

* “Gardner (2016) showed […] people working in the humanities and religion and theology prefer to use Google”. “Humanities scholar use of Google over Google Scholar was also found by Kemman et al. (2013); Google, Google Images, Google Scholar, and YouTube were used more than JSTOR or other library databases”

* “Namei and Young’s [2015] comparison of Summon, Google Scholar, and Google using 299 known-item queries. They found Google Scholar and Summon returned relevant results 74% of the time; Google returned relevant results 91% of the time.”

* “In Yang’s (2016) study of Texas Tech’s DSpace IR [the university repository], Google was the only search engine that indexed, discovered, or linked to PDF files supplemented with metadata; Google Scholar did not discover or provide links to the IR’s PDF files, and was less successful at discovering metadata.”

   I’m guessing this possibly illustrates the value of separating a university’s big dumpy Digital Collections from the nimble research repository, by putting them on different domains? Texas Tech’s DSpace has them both cheek-by-jowl, and adds a Law repository for good measure.

* “IR platform and metadata schema dramatically affect discovery, with some IRs nearly invisible (Weideman 2015; Chen 2014; Orduña-Malea and López-Cózar 2015; Yang 2016) and others somewhat findable by Google Scholar (Lee et al. 2015; Obrien et al. 2016).”

* “Another area needing investigation is the visibility of links to free full text in Google Scholar.” [and more generally] “retrieval of full text, which is another area ripe for more research studies, especially in light of the impressive quantity of full text that can be retrieved without user authentication.” […] “When will academic users find a good-enough selection of full-text articles that they no longer need the expanded full text paid for by their institutions?”

   Indeed.

There are also good formulations of four future-research questions specific to the arts and humanities (pages 27-28).

Summon with OA

I see Summon officially has some new OA filtering functionality…

Poor on OA search, though, and still with dire relevancy sorting on results…

NASA HQ places pictures under ‘non-commercial’ CC

I just noticed that NASA HQ are putting their public domain press photographs on Flickr under “non-commercial” CC. Surely all NASA produced imagery is public domain by default, bar a few items of vintage concept illustration where the artist retained rights? NC also rather goes against the presumed intention of releasing the press pictures, namely their re-use in newspapers and magazines.

Cabells’ Blacklist launches

I’m into my usual ‘summer shutdown’ in terms of paying attention to news, but after a few weeks the news has percolated that Cabells has launched their paywalled Cabells’ International Journal Blacklist of predatory journals. 4,000 “deceptive” journals at launch. How long, I wonder, before a public leak of the site-rip?

Digital Library of India at Archive.org

Digital Library of India, publicly mirrored at Archive.org with over 150,000 volumes in English. The Digital Library of India was launched a year ago as a pilot.

Welsh Newspapers Online

Welsh Newspapers Online, free and public. It’s pleasingly fast, and the user can filter for English / Welsh, News (vs. adverts), and by Decade. Many newspapers carried syndicated articles and news which also appeared in their English counterparts. This can be useful, as the English newspaper archives are behind paywalls.

Beall’s List as a Firefox add-on

Beall’s List 1.2, an add-on for the Firefox Web browser, running from a January 2017 version of the List. Add-on last updated 10th June 2017.

Installed and tested. When you hit a Listed site, you get a simple warning…

Open Access and the Humanities: The Case of Classics Journals

Ojennus, P. (2017), “Open Access and the Humanities: The Case of Classics Journals”, Library Resources & Technical Services 61 (2), pp. 81-92. A thorough paper with the focus on 213 journals in Greek and Roman studies, active at Nov 2015 – Feb 2016.

Recent Activities at the BHL

Overview of the Biodiversity Heritage Library: Recent Activities” (Powerpoint, June 2017). It opens with a general introduction to the service, and only becomes relevant to the “Recent Activities” bit of the title from slide 36 through 46.

Initial prototypes of both SOLR and ElasticSearch full-text search installations were created … about 8Tb disk space (1.6Tb on high-speed SSD) for the [ElasticSearch] Search Index and the OCR text.