Open search tools need sustainable funding – Research Professional News

“The Covid-19 pandemic has triggered an explosion of knowledge, with more than 200,000 papers published to date. At one point last year, scientific output on the topic was doubling every 20 days. This huge growth poses big challenges for researchers, many of whom have pivoted to coronavirus research without experience or preparation.

Mainstream academic search engines are not built for such a situation. Tools such as Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science provide long, unstructured lists of results with little context.

These work well if you know what you are looking for. But for anyone diving into an unknown field, it can take weeks, even months, to identify the most important topics, publication venues and authors. This is far too long in a public health emergency.

The result has been delays, duplicated work, and problems with identifying reliable findings. This lack of tools to provide a quick overview of research results and evaluate them correctly has created a crisis in discoverability itself. …

Building on these, meta-aggregators such as Base, Core and OpenAIRE have begun to rival and in some cases outperform the proprietary search engines. …”

Where Can I Publish? Part 2: Is there a definitive list? – Delta Think

“We set out to examine whether there is a definitive, curated list of journals that researchers can use when deciding on their publication venue. While some offer very good coverage, the short answer appears to be that no one index offers a definitive list.

Across all journals, there seems to be overlap of significant proportions of the mainstream indexes. However, fully OA journals present a more varied landscape. You need to combine multiple lists to round up a comprehensive list of curated fully OA journals.

Our analysis has combined over 100,000 ISSNs across over 65,000 titles and, we think it represents one of the most comprehensive round ups of the coverage of curated lists available….”

2018: best year yet for net growth of open access

Highlights: this edition of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access features charts that illustrate that 2018 showed the strongest growth to date for open access by number of documents searchable through BASE, PubMedCentral, arXiv, DOAJ, texts added to Internet Archive, and journals added to DOAJ….”

Alternative routes to scholarly articles and research outputs

Many scholarly and peer-reviewed articles can be read open access today on the web. A number of free services and archives have developed tools and services helping users to discover research output in an easy and simple way: through installing a browser extension or plug-in; by using academic search engines and archives, or, by contacting the author directly. In the following text, we list a selection of services and ways to find scientific articles. The choice is yours….”

Golden Rules for Repository Managers

“We are indexing all kinds of academically relevant resources – journals, institutional repositories, digital collections etc. – which provide an OAI interface and use OAI-PMH for providing their contents (learn more about OAI at the Open Archives Initiative or Wikipedia). In case your source does not provide an OAI interface, upload your documents to aggregators like DataCite or Zenodo, to subject repositories like RePEC or add your open access journal to DOAJ. We are indexing these sources regularly.

However, the best way to get your documents indexed by BASE is to provide an OAI interface. We have compiled some golden rules that might be helpful to optimize your OAI interface. If your OAI interface complies with these rules, we can assure fast and smooth indexing of your source. Data from your source will be presented completely and in the best possible way….”

Open Knowledge Maps – Working Groups / Open Science – Open Knowledge Forums

We have now connected Open Knowledge Maps to one of the largest academic search engines in the world: BASE. This means, you are able to visualize a research topic from 100+ million documents. And for the first time, you can search within different types of resources, including datasets and software. We would like to thank our collaborators BASE and rOpenSci for their outstanding support in making this happen!

We have also spent a lot of time improving the naming of the sub-areas to make the concepts in a field more visible – which means that this update improves our existing PubMed integration too.

Open Knowledge Maps follows the motto “open science, all the way”. From our roadmap to our source code and our data, we publish everything under an open license that is compatible to the Open Definition. As always, we welcome any feedback you may have!