John Willinski: Public Knowledge Project

This last weekend I was at the Humanities Computing Summer Institute organized by Ray Siemens at the University of Victoria. I heard a great lecture by John Willinski at UBC on the Public Knowledge Project. This project is developing an open source e-journal tool that allows you to manage the review process and publication. They also have a conference tool. This is worth supporting!

In his talk he gave reasons for open access to knowledge. I probably didn’t catch them all, but here are the ones I did:

  • People have a right to know – it is a universal right (universal declaration of knowledge)
  • Ethical arguement: This is knowledge is generated from public funds (and should therefore be returned to the public)
  • Epistemological argument: The quality of knowledge is based on access and distribution. The validity of knowledge is based on its access – anything that limits the distribution of knowledge limits its value and claims. If you prevent the majority of people from accessing knowledge then how can you claim it is true.
  • Huge public intake of information – especially in health information. A new democratic relationship between knowledge and users is emerging. This is changing how, for example, health information is being designed and so on – see pubmed.
  • It is against the author’s best interest to publish in closed journals. If you publish in an open journal you are less likely to be cited or quoted. 4 to 5 times more likely to be quoted.
  • Legal argument: It can be argued that it hurts the interests of the authors not to be published in an open access journal.
  • Is is financially feasible? Yes – open source publishing tools like those from the PKP project reduce the costs to those of reviewing and editing, which have typically been paid for by academics anyway.

Later in a demo he showed a context bar that allows one to lookup the keywords for an article in other research resources. (See The Research Support Tool (Overview).) A very cool enhancement tool. Can TAPoR create a generalized version of such a tool?

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