By year's end, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) will have issued Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies’ Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Sciences. [Meantime, see the draft.]It is the final document in a trilogy of major publications that began in 2003 with the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) blue ribbon report, Revolutionizing Science and Engineering through Cyberinfrastructure. The second publication in the series was the Final Report: NSF SBE-CISE Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure and the Social Sciences, published in May 2005.
The three reports mark a rare occurrence in the history of higher education in the United States: convergence across nearly all disciplines on a single issue, cyberinfrastructure. Together, the reports present an extraordinary shared vision of a new environment needed for intellectual productivity and innovation in research and teaching. They also offer compelling testimony to the need for a robust and sustainable cyberinfrastructure if scholarship and research are to progress or, in some instances, to survive....
Major Recommendations of Our Cultural Commonwealth:
Invest in cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences as a matter of strategic priority.
Develop public and institutional policies that foster openness and access.
Promote cooperation between the public and private sectors.
Cultivate leadership in support of cyberinfrastructure from within the humanities and social sciences.
Encourage digital scholarship.
Establish national centers to support scholarship that contributes to and exploits cyberinfrastructure.
Develop and maintain open standards and robust tools.
Create extensive and reusable digital collections.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/12/2006 02:31:00 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.
