Category Archives: oa.search

The 1970s librarians who revolutionised the challenge of search | Aeon Essays

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“This group of academic guinea pigs, mostly graduate students in education, psychology and librarianship, were part of a radical online search experiment run by the Syracuse University School of Library Science. SUPARS was one of many ambitious information-retrieval studies that took place between the late 1960s and mid-1970s on US university campuses. A number of factors led to the surge in this research. Developments in computer-processing capability for speed and storage had allowed academic databases and catalogues to be digitised and moved online. Computer terminals were newly modular and could be placed around campuses for decentralised access to mainframes. And military and industry funding for computer-based research was more abundant than it had ever been. Given the opportunity, academic librarians took advantage of the chance to explore this expensive new technology. In turn, universities offered unclassified environments for collaborations with corporate technology firms and military groups; SUPARS was sponsored by the Rome Air Development Center, the laboratory arm of the US Air Force….”

The Beilstein-Institut collaborates with Lens.org

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“Lens.org is a secure and open infrastructure to provide our readers with the most comprehensive and accurate overview of the impact of individual published articles. The discovery and citation tool is owned by Cambia, an independent non-profit social enterprise dedicated to democratizing problem solving using science and technology.

We are looking forward to our collaboration with Lens.org to support free, open and secure patent and scholarly searches while ensuring privacy and confidentiality.”

Performing Patents Otherwise: Archival conversations with 320,000 clothing inventions

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Performing Patents Otherwise is one of several experimental book pilot projects conducted by the experimental publishing group at the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs project. In the spirit of open infrastructures, we documented the publication process for each pilot book. Towards this end, the experimental publishing group curated the Experimental Publishing Compendium, which collates experimental book publishing tools and practices and examples of experimental scholarly publications. While we share some insights on the making of experimental scholarly books in the compendium, we will zoom in here on what it takes to make database books and Performing Patents Otherwise in particular.
In the Compendium, we categorised Performing Patents Otherwise as a database book. We define database books as books containing a dynamically searchable database within their pages; or books generated from a database. In ‘making of,’ we reflect on the making Performing Patents Otherwise in the hope that it will be helpful to other authors and publishers who are experimenting with database books.

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© 2023 Julien McHardy & Kat Jungnickel, chapters by respective authors. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. Data from the Politics of Patents research project hosted at Goldsmiths, University of London, and funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (#819458).

 

OA.mg: find and access research papers at lightning speed – scientifyRESEARCH

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“Preface: The first step in any research project is to read up on what others have done, and with OA.mg finding and accessing research papers is becoming easier than ever. We asked Cenk from OA.mg how they are working with the research community to make searching scientific literature better, and learned they are creating a world where knowledge is quickly accessible and open to everyone—and a future with shareable “Paper Playlists”! This interview is part of our ongoing series on innovative companies that are developing tools and support for your research….”

Could There Be Some Viable Challengers to Google Scholar on the Horizon? | Absolutely Maybe

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by Hilda Bastian

In 2019, I wrote a pair of posts about the risks of our reliance on Google Scholar (GS), and search engine alternatives for systematic reviewers. Back then, a thorough assessment of 28 searchable collections of academic records found only 2 that were large enough to come anywhere close to GS’ scope – the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) and WorldWideScience (WWS). And of those, only Microsoft indexed citations so you could search those as well. What’s more, MAG’s corpus was open, so you could download results – which you can’t in GS – or even the whole lot to use in creating something else.

But Microsoft canned Academic Search at the end of 2021. The exercise may have largely been a testing ground for the company’s “AI” search aspirations. Now it’s started a chatbot-driven arms race between its search engine, Bing, and Google. Meanwhile, Google’s cutting jobs and their search engine already seemed to be circling the drain, over-stuffed with ads and Google-surfaced content. It’s even easier to picture GS joining the long list of products scrapped by Google.

I rely on GS on a lot, and all the talk of threats to Google financial standing is making me nervous. So it was definitely time to see whether there are any viable, free-to-use, alternatives spanning all fields now – or even on the distant horizon. And I’ve ended up a lot more relieved – even optimistic – than I expected to be!

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Is Every Law for Everyone? Assessing Access to National Legislation through Official Legal Databases around the World | Oxford Journal of Legal Studies | Oxford Academic

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Abstract:  Countries all over the world document their statutory law in official legal databases (OLD), but the extent to which these provide effective access to (statutory) law remains unexamined. Ideally, an OLD should be (i) provided online and free for all without requiring registration or payment, (ii) searchable with regard to statutes’ titles, (iii) searchable with regard to the full texts of statutes, (iv) provided in a reusable text-based format and (v) comprehensive in its coverage of at least the laws currently in force. To highlight the nature of OLDs as consumer products, we borrow a term from business operations research and refer to a database fulfilling these basic criteria as a ‘minimum viable’ OLD. We survey 204 states and jurisdictions to assess how far their country-level OLDs adhere to the minimum viability standard. We find that only 48% of them do; 12% of states do not seem to offer any online OLD at all; and a further 40% of countries offer legal databases that lack at least one of the criteria listed above. The quality of legal access is associated with geographical distribution (with Europe faring the best), economic development and a population’s overall Internet usage. The results suggest that comparative legal research faces considerable hurdles when dealing with the Global South; that metadata-enriched digitalisation of legal corpora still remains a desideratum for at least half the world; and that the inaccessibility of law may carry high costs for legal practitioners and the wider public.

 

Is Every Law for Everyone? Assessing Access to National Legislation through Official Legal Databases around the World | Oxford Journal of Legal Studies | Oxford Academic

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Abstract:  Countries all over the world document their statutory law in official legal databases (OLD), but the extent to which these provide effective access to (statutory) law remains unexamined. Ideally, an OLD should be (i) provided online and free for all without requiring registration or payment, (ii) searchable with regard to statutes’ titles, (iii) searchable with regard to the full texts of statutes, (iv) provided in a reusable text-based format and (v) comprehensive in its coverage of at least the laws currently in force. To highlight the nature of OLDs as consumer products, we borrow a term from business operations research and refer to a database fulfilling these basic criteria as a ‘minimum viable’ OLD. We survey 204 states and jurisdictions to assess how far their country-level OLDs adhere to the minimum viability standard. We find that only 48% of them do; 12% of states do not seem to offer any online OLD at all; and a further 40% of countries offer legal databases that lack at least one of the criteria listed above. The quality of legal access is associated with geographical distribution (with Europe faring the best), economic development and a population’s overall Internet usage. The results suggest that comparative legal research faces considerable hurdles when dealing with the Global South; that metadata-enriched digitalisation of legal corpora still remains a desideratum for at least half the world; and that the inaccessibility of law may carry high costs for legal practitioners and the wider public.

 

Where to search for research journal literature – some common errors I see on choice of sources (I) | Aaron Tay’s Musings about librarianship

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“As academic librarians helping early-stage researchers (Masters, Phds students), we are often asked to provide guidance on the literature review process in one shot classes. One thing we tend to focus on during such sessions is the keyword search technique, though many of us also cover alternative to keyword techniques like citation searching, starting off with review articles etc.

It seems to me though there are limits to what we can help for keyword searching in one shot classes, since the audience will all be working in varied topics (most commonly they may not even have a good idea of what they are looking for) and as much as we can give general advice on the use of keywords at the end of day the user has to do a lot of their own practice via iterated searching (unless this is an area where the librarian had prior experience working in)

One thing though I have been thinking about increasingly is to talk about WHERE to search.  

Compared to twenty or even ten years ago, the number of academic databases, academic search engines and other tools available to search has increased exponentially even if you focus only on those that work via keyword searching….”

Measuring Metadata Impacts: Books Discoverability in Google Scholar – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“The scholarly publishing community talks a LOT about metadata and the need for high-quality, interoperable, and machine-readable descriptors of the content we disseminate. However, as we’ve reflected on previously in the Kitchen, despite well-established information standards (e.g., persistent identifiers), our industry lacks a shared framework to measure the value and impact of the metadata we produce.

In 2021, we embarked on a Crossref-sponsored study designed to measure how metadata impacts end-user experiences and contributes to the successful discovery of academic and research literature via the mainstream web. Specifically, we set out to learn if scholarly books with DOIs (and associated metadata) were more easily found in Google Scholar than those without DOIs.

Initial results indicated that DOIs have an indirect influence on the discoverability of scholarly books in Google Scholar — however, we found no direct linkage between book DOIs and the quality of Google Scholar indexing or users’ ability to access the full text via search-result links. Although Google Scholar claims to not use DOI metadata in its search index, the results of our mixed-methods study of 100+ books (from 20 publishers) demonstrate that books with DOIs are generally more discoverable than those without DOIs….”

Preprints als Informationsquelle besser nutzbar machen – TH Köln

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From Google’s English:  “In the project PIXLS – Preprint Information eXtraction for Life Sciences, TH Köln and ZB MED will develop an application over the next three years that automatically opens up the preprint server. This enables the research community to make better use of current information that was published on preprint servers – and therefore hardly appears in classic detection and search systems.

The German Research Foundation (DFG) is funding the project as part of the e-Research Technologies framework programme.”

DFG – Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft – Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft schafft Grundlagen für die Veröffentlichung von Abschlussberichten

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From Google’s English:  “Recipients of grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG) are obliged to report on their work and the results obtained after completing their project. The reports serve to account for the use of public funds and provide information about the success of the funding and for the further development of funding programs….

In order to broaden the scientific information base and to contribute to the necessary culture change in scientific publishing, the DFG Executive Board has decided to make final reports of DFG projects easier to access and to make the scientific results section from project reports publicly accessible….

In future, grant recipients will be asked to make part of the final report intended for publication accessible in suitable repositories. The publication is supported by corresponding templates, which specify a structuring into a part intended for publication and a non-public part. In addition, the DFG provides a non-binding white list that identifies at least one possible place of publication for each scientific area according to tested quality standards….

For most applications approved after January 1, 2023, the templates provided are mandatory when preparing the final report. Projects that were approved at an earlier point in time can also use the templates. From summer 2023 it will be possible to send the link to the repository to the DFG via the elan application portal and link the reports in GEPRIS….”

The State of Journal Production and Access 2022: Report on survey of independent academic publishers

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“Among the main findings on the topic of journal production were:

• Compared to 2020, there was apparent growth in journals producing HTML articles.

• Full-text XML article production remained flat since 2020 (38% in 2020 and 2022).

• 50%+ respondents included ORCIDs and DOIs in metadata, but other PIDs like author/ contributor roles, funder IDs, and organizational IDs had lower adoption rates. That said, some PIDs increased across the two surveys, including Funder ID (20% in 2022 versus 16% in 2020) and CRediT (22% in 2022 versus 16% in 2020).

• Most respondents said PDF and HTML are the most important article formats for their readers, as well as reaching publishing program goals.

• When asked to rate their publishers’ primary production goals, most respondents chose “journal/article search engine optimization” (86% reported that this was “very” or “somewhat” important).

Among the main findings on the topic of journal access were:

• 95% of respondents said at least one of their publisher’s journals offered OA options.

• 80% of respondents said their organization utilizes fully-OA publishing models.

• When asked to rate their publishers’ primary funding/revenue priorities, most respondents chose “identifying viable funding model(s) for publishing one or more fully-OA journals” (68% reported it’s “very” or “somewhat” important).

• Institutional subsidies and grants were seen as having the highest OA funding potential…”

Metadata on open access books in BASE – ScienceOpen

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Abstract:  BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) is one of the world’s largest search engines for academic documents on the web, with references to around 310 million documents. Cross-system metadata communication and standardization are fundamental prerequisites for the development of BASE and comparable information systems. The presentation focuses on the metadata of open access books and book chapters in BASE, whose share of the total index has increased significantly in recent years, and illustrates the challenge of further dissemination of open access book metadata.