... It just so happens that our new boss, Deputy Vice Chancellor Philip Candy is meeting with staff over the next couple of weeks, and he’s asking us for three ideas for the future where we would value his assistance/input. ... Here are three substantial goals to which I think [the University of Southern Queensland] should aspire before someone else aspires to them and steals the thunder. I think these would take us well on the way to being a truly open university:
Be the first university in Australia to mandate that theses are deposited in the institutional repository in HTML, with linked data and embedded semantics as well as the standard paper-on-screen PDF file. ...
The Open Access movement is now well established, and USQ already has a mandate that all theses are to be submitted electronically and to go into ePrints when the degree is conferred. This does help to make research available to the community that paid for it, but it is such a pity that in the web age we are still stuck with the paper view of a research output. Citations are not reliably machine readable, data sets are rarely made available and if they are they are not linked into the thesis. And worst of all, the thesis is not made available in HTML where it is part of the fabric of the web. Can you imagine a university getting away with a web site which was PDF only? We certainly try not to deliver courses that way. In most web situations PDF is considered an accessibility barrier and yet in the repository community it’s the main game. ...
Getting spectacularly data-rich highly-linked theses online is one way to change the expectation of up and coming academics. They will be able to continue to use ICE to create their papers and where publishers allow it, will be able to deposit these as well into repositories, given the right adapters. But as I noted in my paper for eResearch Australasia last year, the big problem is that publishers are not set up to accept rich documents, so there is little reason for people to care. I still like the example of Peter Murray-Rust writing a paper using a web editing package, all about semantically rich publishing. Then having to put it into Microsoft Word to submit it to the journal.
My proposed solution to that? Make new publishers who do accept semantically rich HTML. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 5/07/2009 10:54:00 AM.
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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
