I assume that most people who read this weblog also read David Wiley’s autounfocus — and do so before checking out my own untidy little corner of the web. But in the interests of spreading the word on a promising announcement, I’ll quote from his latest posting
…given all our interests in reusability and syndication, why not crossbreed a peer-reviewed journal, blog, and a news aggregator? A peer-reviewed blog / aggregation service. Think something like:
* a clear statement of the topic(s) of interest to the publication / discourse-facilitation service
* all content would begin its life online somewhere else – a blog, personal website, etc. trackback facilities make blogs preferable.
* a k5 -esque story submission queue with editorial comments (also via trackback from other blogs) and a peer-review (voting) mechanism. articles could be submitted via trackback pings at publication time by their authors, or through a form-based approach by non-authors, as long as the content is cc-licensed (for more of a blog feel — “hey, here’s a great paper I found on LOs, repositories, and trackback! it should be published and talked about in the peer-reviewed blog!”) editorial comments given via trackback (when available) would let authors whose work is unknowlingly submitted know their work is being considered and how it could be improved.
* archived and permalink-ed papers, articles, etc. with trackback enabled, allowing readers to follow an ongoing dialogue from one article to the next
* trackback-enabled threaded comments which will allow readers to enter the discourse at any point and follow it forward and backward across comments and articles
* a clear path for moving high-quality discussions out of the comments world into the publication world, purposefully blurring the line between publication and discourse
* cc-licensing of all content, including comments
* subscribe-able / searchable RSS feeds of new articles, comments, etc.
Other than applauding the notion, I don’t have a whole lot of value-add to contribute here. (“Bad! Bad Weblogger! Cyber-parasite!!”) Though this might be an opportune time to note a couple of weblogs I’ve recently stumbled across that are poking around in the domain of open-access scholarly publications:
FOS News: “News from the free online scholarship movement” via open-education.org
and -=( In Between )=- , run by Henk Ellerman, project leader for the Erasmus Electronic Publishing Initiative’s EUR Repository.
And since I am giving all appearances of discoursing on this topic after all, I’ll note that based here at UBC is another vibrant open access scholarly publishing initiative, the Public Knowledge Project. Given our own interests in open content here at the Learning Object Supercentre of Love, I can’t help but wonder if the accordances between “open educators” and “open access scholars” (forgive the homely terminology) couldn’t be more usefully exploited.
Perhaps these alliances already exist, but from my own ill-informed vantage it appears to be yet another instance of related movements struggling in isolation toward a common goal.
BTW, I’ve recently approached the PKP, and they seem open to some form of collaboration. But other than a loose agreement that our systems should be able to query one another, I’m not even sure what to propose. (Your thoughts are welcome.)
