AskPhilosophers is a new Q&A site for philosophy. Readers send in philosophical questions, a moderator screens out the cranks and pornographers, and philosophers from a hand-picked panel answer them. The questions are sorted into 20 categories or sub-topics, which users can follow individually or in a mix. All the content is OA. The site even has an RSS feed.
Comment. It's simple but it works. I like it, and not just because it's in my own field. I like it because it's the most promising format I've seen for solving what could be called the last-mile problem for knowledge. Lots of dedicated researchers do lots of difficult research, which is then written up, vetted, published, and disseminated. This knowledge makes it from the ether to the mind of the researcher, then to paper or disk, then to a publisher, and then to the library or internet. But it very rarely jumps the last gap to the curious person who wants to know what it's all about. There are lots of reasons, including the cost of access and the scarcity of time. But an important part of the problem is that this knowledge is usually intelligible only to specialists, excluding both lay readers and professional researchers from other fields. What we badly need is a service to connect these large bodies of knowledge to curious minds --to solve the last-mile problem. Research publications typically leave the gap unbridged. Listservs either let in too much spam at the query end or let out too much self-righteous gas at the answer end. General Q&A sites don't attract enough knowledgeable people as question-answerers. And lay summaries of cutting-edge research don't necessarily answer the questions that curious minds want to ask. What I like about AskPhilosophers is that it's question-driven, professionally staffed, and moderates both the input and the output. Serious questions will get through and, when they do, they will receive serious answers. I'd love to see every discipline set up something similar. Right now, I'd spend a lot of my time at AskGeologists, AskMathematicians, and AskNutritionists. Scholars: start your engines.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/07/2005 01:17:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
