The Best Open Tools for Discovering OA Arts and Humanities Research – newsbreaks.infotoday.com

Everyone enjoys finding free research materials online, especially independent scholars in the arts and humanities. These dedicated and often financially challenged scholarly workers are forced to use open search tools to discover open content. Such open+open tools do exist, often in circumstances as precarious as their users are, and these tools can be vital for those without access to the walled gardens of universities.

About a decade ago, I made the JURN search tool for such people. JURN discovers the full text of open journals in the arts and humanities. It runs on a Google Custom Search Engine to provide Google-level speed, semantics, relevance ranking, and de-duplication of results. JURN now also comprehensively covers ecology journals, and it has a sister tool, GRAFT, which searches the world’s repositories. Neither tool is perfect, even with my annual maintenance and with Google automatically weeding out dead URLs. But try it out for yourself. Note that JURN may seem…