Recent links on Open Access

• EduPunk Repositories: If you don’t have access to an institutional or subject repository you can self-archive in, here’s a review of some alternatives.
• The evolution of scientific impact: PLoS’s article-based metrics rely on user comments on articles, but it has been difficult to persuade scientists to comment on each other’s articles on the Internet.
• Sustainability of OA archives: What if the archive you depend on disappears for lack of funding?  ‘If Cornell can’t underwrite arXiv, arguably the most successful preprint archive ever, what does that mean for disciplinary repositories generally?’
• P2P U., an Experiment in Free Online Education, Opens for Business: ‘A group of professors and graduate students from around the world has started a new university of their own online, with an unusual model that is more like a book group than a traditional course.’
• When the “Wiki Way” = Poor Quality: Why ‘the distributed, “Wikipedia model” of content production does not work for textbooks’.
• PLoS Mulls Hosting Software amid Growing Crossover between Informatics and Publishing: ‘the team is ironing out details, such as whether to create a repository like SourceForge. . . .’  Maybe someone will notice that unlike PLoS, SourceForge doesn’t charge anything to let you contribute to the projects it hosts, or to start your own project there.
• E-textbook Mania Strikes Higher Ed: ‘truly open access textbooks offer a model that in the long run best serves faculty and their students. . . . Students are far more interested in the textbook crisis than the journal crisis.’
• Open-source textbook co. Flat World goes back to school with 40,000 new customers: The company makes money by selling customer service, printed textbooks and audiobooks; the electronic versions are free.  Sounds like Red Hat.

Živković predicts future self-publishing real time peer reviewing science

From an interview with Bora Živković, the online Community Manager of the Open Access Journal PLoS One, answering the question will Open access change the way science is done, he says:

I think it is inevitable that we get there, the only thing I do not say is how fast, because there will be a lot of resistance, because scientist are reall very conservative and risk-averse in changing the system. But there are pioneers that are going to lead the way. They are going to get us to that point where research is put directly online in real time. There will be no such things as journals any more, only platforms for self-publishing, where massive peer-review is going on in real time. What’s going to happen is the evolution of a system that assigns reputation to individuals depending on their contribution to the process. That is the key, I think. Once you can gain scientific reputation by your online contribution, theoretical work, commenting, or peer-reviewing others, then people will participate

He predicts that scientific papers will evolve into collections consisting of parts from various scientific sources, in which people with talent for synthesis will emerge as those who monitor ongoing open research and write review papers. Read the full interview here.

Commentpress for books in progress

A system called CommentPress, collection of plugins and a themes for WordPress, does something close to what Ben i and talked about as a workable way to comment on books in progress. It’s still in development and mostly based on jquery.

Having it would mean self hosted WordPress installation. I tested it with Debian/testing WP packpage (2.7.1-2) and 1.4.1 CommentPress following these simple (really) steps . It works just fine.

Installing WP on Debian, at least for a single blog, is trivial (apt-get install wordpress + apache config), and CommentPress needs to be dropped into plugins directory (the rest of instructions at CP website refer to an old WP version), enabled from admin blog panel as the current Theme, and that’s it.