An upcoming event — on Saturday, February 5th, Jeff Todahl will lead a community panel dialogue on the Partnership for Nonviolence, a community prevention effort to reduce family violence in Lane County, Oregon. The talk will be from 11am – 2:00pm at the University of Oregon in Eugene.
For more details on this talk, visit http://education.uoregon.edu/feature.htm?id=2745.
Open Access Week 2010 is almost here! The University of Oregon Libraries will participate. I will attend this Friday’s keynote, “Why Open Access Works and Copyright Doesn’t” by Duke University’s Kevin Smith. What are you doing for Open Access Week?
The UC Berkeley Library offers a concise and compelling argument for the consideration of Open Access Publishing. Their brief cost analysis and review of the burden of the traditional publication process on universities brings into focus the state of scholarly publishing and the need for significant change. I agree with the description of this situation as a “crisis in scholarly communication” and it is exciting to see the advocacy efforts of SPARC and others in this Open Access movement.
As a student of the University of Oregon, I am delighted that the Provost has made funding support available to scholars pursuing Open Access publication.
If you are a part of an academic community, does your school provide a similar program? What are other sources of Open Access publishing support for journals that require author payments? I am interested to hear from readers who have thoughts on Open Access publishing – those who have published Open Access articles, those who read Open Access articles, and others.
Mendeley stole my heart this summer. After a lackluster relationship with EndNote, I was lured by Mendeley’s polished UI and syncing features. Its social-networking-for-geeks encourages a little extroversion among the shy. I love the delinquent rush of highlighting text and adding sticky notes to PDFs. Now the Mendeley-powered Reader Meter provides an opportunity to stand in awe of scholarly giants in real time.
Remember the Milk is my means to an experiment in project management. Developed by an Australian team, it integrates with Gmail, Google Calendar and some cell phones. While the shortcuts require a small learning curve, it’s not a steep one. Thanks to the Pocket Techie for such a great find!
On a separate topic, I find that within the social sciences technology can be a barrier in project management and project completion for some scientists. If any readers have suggestions for helping the tech-wary overcome their reluctance, I welcome your thoughts.
Drupal Gardens has captured my attention lately. If you want to follow along in the development, feel free to stop by. While many academics seem to rally around Joomla!, my pocket web developer recommended Drupal Gardens. I’ve been having a great time with it! The themes have social media features built in, the WYSIWYG editor is user friendly, simple views are, well, simple. So far, so good.
The project, ACCESS Resources, was an enthusiastic solution to a page limitation crunch for a book chapter my colleagues and I are writing. It is also a first step towards making my work more available, such as having a creative commons copyright and accessibility.
I’m interested in accessibility for a few reasons. Increasing access to research and information is one part of the translational research process. It is also an extension of social justice efforts toward negotiating the privilege hierarchy between those who are active members of higher education and those who are not. Accessibility in the form of Open Access publishing provides a connection between research funded with public resources with the public. It may even help promote academic freedom while maintaining the integrity of the peer-review process. I’m very curious to watch and be a part of the trajectory of the Open Access movement.
As I continue to learn more about Open Access publishing, I’ll share my thoughts. If you are new to to OA publications, here are a few of my new favorite sources: PLoS | Public Library of Science, PKP | Public Knowledge Project, and the DOAJ | Directory of Open Access Journals.
Borrowing from danah boyd and David Weinberger, here is a very abbreviated disclosure statement:
I look forward to sharing current projects, discussing Open Access research and the intersection of technology and social science.
Thanks for reading.
More to come on that…
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