Category Archives: oa.search

Sven Fund on Knowledge Unlatched’s New Open Research Library

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” “What researchers really want right now, says Sven Fund, “is one platform where you can search within one environment and where you don’t hit a paywall.” 

That platform and that environment is being announced today (May 16) by Fund’s Knowledge Unlatched. Open Research Libraryis, a program of free access to open access content. The beta edition of the Open Research Library is available now, with a full launch expected in October.

Created with the assistance of a platoon of partners, the Open Research Library is meant to bring together all open access book content in the coming months, providing a one-stop hub with broad organizational categories to aid in searches….”

Open Research Library

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“The Open Research Library (ORL) will include all Open Access scholarly book content worldwide on one platform for user-friendly discovery, offering a seamless experience navigating more than 20,000 Open Access books. This comprehensive collection of peer-reviewed Open Access books will be openly accessible for everyone. Libraries investing in the Open Research Library contribute to the development of a vital infrastructure for the global research community, while participating libraries have the opportunity to benefit from a set of exclusive services.

The beta version of this platform launched on the 13th of May 2019, with a full launch scheduled to go live in October 2019….”

Knowledge Unlatched and partners launch Open Research Library – Knowledge Unlatched

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“Free access to scientific content is often limited due to the fragile technical infrastructure around it: content is stored in a variety of versions at various locations and without any uniform search functionalities. The Open Access initiative Knowledge Unlatched has addressed this growing problem and is now launching the Open Research Library together with several international partners. Its goal is to unite all Open Access (OA) book content over the coming months. To this end the Open Research Library is working with publishers and libraries worldwide and is open to all providers and users of quality-assured research content.

Around 15,000 to 20,000 books have been published Open Access worldwide to date, freely available to users all over the world, and about 4,000 more are added every year. Currently these titles are offered for use by scientists on numerous different publishing and distribution websites. The aim of this new initiative is to combine all available book content under one search and hosting interface and to ensure that the provision of corresponding catalogue data is made available to library systems. The hosting of all book content is free of charge. In order to finance the ongoing technical costs Knowledge Unlatched will initiate a partner project to secure the necessary funding….”

Get The Research

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“There is research of all types on Get The Research. In this early release it specializes in research in biology and medicine (papers indexed by PubMed) — this will be widened further in the future….

How do I know what research I can trust?

 

This is a great question. Get The Research flags each article with its “level of evidence” when we know it — is the article just a report about a single patient (a “case study”) or a more trustworthy analysis combining the results of many studies (a “meta-analysis”)? Click on the tags above the article titles to learn more. We rank articles with higher levels of evidence higher in the search results to make these easier to find. Reading the news studies about a paper (linked to from the “Learn More” page when we’ve found news articles) is a great way to find out what others think about the results….”

 

Welcome to the Archives Unleashed Project

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“Archives Unleashed aims to make petabytes of historical internet content accessible to scholars and others interested in researching the recent past. Supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we are developing web archive search and data analysis tools to enable scholars, librarians and archivists to access, share, and investigate recent history since the early days of the World Wide Web….”

ROAD, the Directory of Open Access scholarly Resources | ISSN

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“Launched in December 2013, ROAD provides a free access to those ISSN bibliographic records which describe scholarly resources in Open Access: journals, monographic series, conference proceedings, academic repositories and scholarly blogs. These records, created by the ISSN Network (90 National Centres worldwide + the International Centre), are enriched by information extracted from indexing and abstracting databases, directories (DOAJ, Latindex, The Keepers registry) and journals indicators (Scopus).

ROAD is in line with the actions of UNESCO for promoting Open Access to scientific resources. ROAD is complementary to the Global Open Access Portal (GOAP) developed by UNESCO and providing a snapshot of the status of Open Access to scientific information around the world….”

6 reasons why you should try Lens.org – Aaron Tay – Medium

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“Lens is in my book one of the most interesting Scholarly discovery/ citation index tools to have emerged in 2018. I am not saying this lightly as 2018 was the year crowded with new discovery services like Dimensions, 1Findr (now acquired by Elsevier), Meta (in closed beta at time of writing) and more.

Owned by the non-profit Cambia, it promises to be free of charge for all (no freemium model) and further more claims to safeguard your privacy with no use of Google Analytics or other cloud based click-trackers.

Of course all this isn’t worth anything if the tool isn’t useful. Given the dominance of Google Scholar as a discovery tool, there seemingly isn’t much room for another discovery tool. But Lens I think is more than just a simple discovery tool, it actually allows you to explore and analyze the data in ways Google Scholar is unable to match, thanks to a blend of powerful filters, facets , customizable visualization capability and bulk export functions….”

#DontLeaveItToGoogle: How Open Infrastructures Enable Continuous Innovation in the Research Workflow | Zenodo

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Abstract:  Closed and proprietary infrastructures limit the accessibility of research, often putting paywalls in front of scientific knowledge. But they also severely limit reuse, preventing other tools from building on top of their software, data, and content. Using the example of Google Scholar, I will show how these characteristics of closed infrastructures impede innovation in the research workflow and create lock-in effects. I will also demonstrate how open infrastructures can help us move beyond this issue and create an ecosystem that is community-driven and community-owned. In this ecosystem, innovation thrives, as entry barriers are removed and systems can make use of each other’s components. Specific consideration will be given to open source services and non-profit frontends, as they are often overlooked by funders, but represent the way researchers engage with open science.

How I made my own open-access “research portal” – Devpolicy Blog from the Development Policy Centre

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“It is difficult – but not impossible – to access academic articles if you don’t have access to journal subscriptions. In this blog, I go through my experience in trying to gain access to academic articles and data while working at the University of Papua New Guinea (UPNG), and how I tried to make the process as easy and efficient as possible. I hope that by sharing the story, and sharing the research portal that I created, that researchers without access to journal subscriptions have more of a chance to find the information they need.

The portal aggregates over 750 sources of online, open data, academic and government articles and makes them searchable through a customisable Google search tool. Most of the work was in finding these resources; putting them in the custom Google search tool was simple. I provide a link to an Excel sheet with all the sources below….”

SCOPE: A digital archives access interface

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Abstract:  The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) identified certain technological issues, namely extensive reference workflows and under-utilizing existing metadata, as significant barriers to access for its born-digital archives. In collaboration with Artefactual Systems, the CCA built SCOPE, a digital archives access interface. SCOPE allows for granular file- and item-level searching within and across digital archives, and lets users download access copies of the collection material directly to a local machine. SCOPE is a free, open-source tool. The beta version is available to the public, and a second phase is under-development as of Spring 2019.