The day today is Tuesday 11th June 2024. It marks at least 193 days now since the subscription access journal Heterocycles (e-ISSN: 1881-0942) was taken offline by its publisher. Published since 1973, it is a “key” journal in chemistry and contains over 17,000 articles which have been cited at least 164,000 times. The journal is preserved in the CLOCKSS archive.

As you may have seen in the news, the British Library has been affected by a significant cyberattack. Many of the digital services it provides have gone down and stayed down for many weeks now, whilst investigations take place. I have a lot of sympathy for the BL staff. As has been observed, public services can be a relatively easy target.

My final repost today (edited) from the Open Knowledge Foundation blog. It’s a little old, originally posted on the 16th of April, 2013 but I think it definitely deserves to be here on my blog as a record of my activities… So… it’s over.

I’ve been quoted in a Nature News story about Open Access journal licencing. I’m a staunch defender of the use of the Creative Commons Attribution licence, as it’s a good licence for academic research. Here’s just some of what I sent Richard Van Noorden (Nature News) by email. I don’t blame him for only using select quotes.

The Ecological Society of America (ESA) would like your input on how to expand access to their publications and what they should do if * gasp* the USA also mandates some form of public or open access …like the rest of the world seems to be doing at the moment. The official call is here in this new free to access ESA publication (at the end): Collins, S., Goldberg, D., Schimel, J., and McCarter, K. 2013.

Here’s my submission for the House of Lords inquiry. I rather ran out of steam writing it so you’ll see it tails off towards the end. There’s probably loads of things I should mention too. But alas, I have lots of other work to be getting on with right now. Ironically, I highlight the excellent journal Impact Factor‘s of some OA journals. Please forgive me for those sins! So here it is:

So a week ago, I investigated publisher-produced Version of Record PDFs with pdfinfo and the results were very disappointing. Lots of missing metadata was found and one could not reliably identify most of these PDFs from metadata alone, let alone extract particular fields of interest. But Rod Page kindly alerted to me the fact that I might be using the wrong tool for this investigation.

Why is it so difficult to identify academic publisher PDFs? With published MP3 files of audio you get rather good metadata. Take for example an MP3 file I downloaded from Hacker Public Radio available at the bottom of this post.

I’m proud to announce I have a new article over at Palaeontology [Online] The Palaeontology [Online] logo – by the P [O] team, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution LicensePosts at ‘P [O]’ are primarily aimed at public-engagement and since the site was launched back in July 2011, with sponsorship and support from the Palaeontology Association, one post per month has been featured on site.

So there’s been a few already: SpotOn day 1 &