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.

CC Search

The apparently-new front-end for the CC Search – Image Search, for speedily finding re-usable Creative Commons images. There are said to be 289 million pictures here, mostly via Common Crawl apparently, from sources including DeviantArt. But Flickr is apparently not yet completely incorporated. Given the size it’s delightfully quick, and as you can see here it’s possible to ‘stack and chain’ the filters by selecting them repeatedly…

The drawback, compared to Google Images, is that in this incarnation of CC Search (the old one is still available) there’s no size filter and the relevancy ranking of results appears to be ‘easily distracted’. My very first search for Mongolian folk song got me a whole lot of Latvian folk dance, scrolling down into as a vast amount of Indian folk music. Very nice, but it took a lot of scrolling to eventually get down to some Mongolian content…

CC Search is under continual improvement through 2019 and more features are planned. Looking down the list in their forward plan I see that searching for CC texts is said to be coming to the new interface later in the summer (“incorporate open texts from major providers”), along with another design makeover (a new “distinct visual look and feel for landing page”).

There’s also talk of future delivery of a front-end for displaying “3D designs”, which suggests that 2020 or 2021 could see a very useful feature, a unified search for all CC 3D model files. I’d suggest that’s what vital in such a tool is a ‘can be re-textured’ search filter, as 3D models are not much use for quick re-use if (as is often the case with CC freebies) the material zones are either missing entirely or screwed up, which means they can’t be re-textured without specialist software and arcane skills. Perhaps a public user-feedback button could be used to indicate “I had success with this great model” / “Don’t waste your time on this”.

Review of Cabell’s Predatory Journal Blacklist

A new review of a paywalled up-to-date blacklist of predatory journals, “Cabell’s Predatory Journal Blacklist: An Updated Review”, at the Scholarly Kitchen.

The world’s remote coral reefs, mapped

Newly published, a “High-resolution habitat and bathymetry maps for 65,000 sq. km of Earth’s remotest coral reefs”. It’s a new world-map of such coral reefs, in an interactive map where the data appears to be Attribution open access…

the Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation embarked on a 10-yr survey of a broad selection of Earth’s remotest reef sites — the Global Reef Expedition. [producing a] meter-resolution seafloor habitat and bathymetry maps developed from DigitalGlobe satellite imagery and calibrated by field observations.”

“We are particularly grateful to our long-standing partnership with Dr. Sam Purkis’ remote sensing lab at the NOVA Southeastern University Oceanographic Center. From the satellite acquisition process, to ground-truthing field work, to creating the habitat maps and bathymetry products, Dr. Purkis’ lab is world-class. Additionally, this magnificent web application was created by an outstanding project management team from Geographic Information Services, Inc (GISi). GIS, Inc. was an absolute pleasure to work with on this exciting project.

Here’s my example zoom of the interactive map, down into the Red Sea…

The red dots in the top screenshot are the reefs, and the red dots in the last screenshot indicates the project’s video locations.

Some perspective…

“Perspectives on the open access discovery landscape”…

“An open question in the area of OA discovery is what proportion of the total academic literature is available in an open version. In this case, Crossref would be a solid starting point…”

“Under the assumption that a reliable and accurate database is available matching DOIs/titles/other queries to OA URLs, the computational effort to connect the former to the latter is relatively low.”

“In order to improve OA discovery, the scholarly communications community will have to focus on metadata. We expect that improvements in metadata on the side of institutional repositories and preprint servers would be the most effective to support OA discovery tools…”