Hathi’s toolset now runs on all its content

Hathi now offers free public tools that provide…

“access to the text of the complete 16.7-million-item HathiTrust corpus for non-consumptive research, such as data mining and computational analysis, including items protected by copyright.”

Previously the tools could only run over Hathi’s public domain content.

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Cats in stacks

A new article, “Ask a Catbrarian: Marketing Library Services Using a Cat”…

“Although Uggles was already well known within the library system and among many of the undergraduate students, Uggles’s popularity really took off once Uggles began ‘hiding’ around campus.”

Google’s new Dataset Search tool

Google has a new Dataset Search tool. It looks good.

An initial test search for Krita (the open source paint software) didn’t pick up anything, so it is just limited to datasets and is not also bringing in general file-names from FTP servers.

A wide search for Antarctica Cephalopods then gave a good set of 25 results, all of which were record pages that appeared to place their dataset under CC or to be public domain (NASA etc). There doesn’t appear to be any way to then load a further set of results, or to do a further keyword search within the record-pages of the results.

Playing tag

It’s 2018 and… “we still lack the ability to record in MARC when a URL leads to open access content”. Apparently the librarian solution to that, in 2018, is to add an “unambiguous numeric marker in an 856 subfield” designating open access.

‘Citation rot’ in legal journals

“In a sample of several legal journals, approximately 70% of all links in citations published between 1999 and 2011 no longer point to the same material.” says the Harvard Law School Library.

Forum for Open Access in South Asia

As well as the existing and active Open Access India Facebook Group, there’s now also a wider Forum for Open Access in South Asia Facebook Group. This includes India but has a wider remit either side, in terms of the geography.

Robo-censorship doesn’t work

A new post from an elected member of the European Parliament (MEP), Julia Reda in Germany. “Out-of-control censorship machines removed my article warning of out-of-control censorship machines”…

“A few days ago, about a dozen articles and campaign sites criticising EU plans for copyright censorship machines silently vanished from the world’s most popular search engine. Proving their point in the most blatant possible way, the sites were removed by exactly what they were warning of: Copyright censorship machines.”

Open Access Availability of Articles from Highly Ranked Religious Studies Journals

“The Open Access Availability of Articles from Highly Ranked Religious Studies Journals: A Study of Ten Journals”, Theological Librarianship, April 2018.

A study of ten highly-ranked religious journals in mid 2015, aiming to find 377 paywalled articles in free self-archived and repository form (by 2016). The choice of top-titles means it was slanted toward health/medical (Journal of Health Care Chaplaincy, Journal of Religion and Health, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, Intl. Journal for the Psychology of Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion were five of the ten), and so it probably shouldn’t be taken as a measure of trends in the core humanities. I suspect they would have had less success with leading paywalled journals in church history, art history, theology, music, ethnography etc.

Nevertheless, the results are interesting…

“OA versions were found for 132 (35 percent) of” [the 377 articles, and] “results indicate that using both Google and Google Scholar to search for OA religious studies journal scholarship yields better results than only using Google or Google Scholar.”

Of course one can’t guarantee that what’s online a year after publication will still be online a decade later, if self-archiving. It would be interesting to see a long-term study of the “rot rate” or “404 rate” in OA unofficial self-archiving of paywalled articles over the period of a decade. I’d suspect it would be around 40%.

DOAJ returns

The DOAJ is back, according to a message yesterday from Clara Armengou, the DOAJ Project and Communications Manager…

Dear community

We are happy to inform that our site is now back to normal and our services have resumed. We are still working on a long-term stability strategy and we will be able to update you on that and also provide a more detailed explanation of our issues soon.

Thank you again for your patience over the last few weeks.

“Google Scholar, Web Of Science, and Scopus: A Systematic Comparison of Citations”

A new preprint on arxiv.org, “Google Scholar, Web Of Science, and Scopus: A Systematic Comparison of Citations in 252 Subject Categories”.

Google Scholar’s… “citation data is essentially a superset of WoS and Scopus, with substantial extra coverage.” This is partly because “Google Scholar is able to pick up citations… “from non-journal sources … including theses, books, conference papers, and unpublished materials … Many were non-English (19%-38%), and they tended to be much less cited than citing sources that were also in Scopus or WoS.”

However, there are also warnings in the conclusions section, especially that in Google Scholar… “some of the citations [come] from Master’s theses”. Also note that Google Scholar’s citation counts were found to be “lower in the Humanities”.