A new online information service launching in early 2006 aims to build on the model of free online encyclopedia Wikipedia by inviting acknowledged experts in a range of subjects to review material contributed by the general public.
Called Digital Universe, the project is the brainchild of, among others, USWeb founder Joe Firmage and Larry Sanger, one of Wikipedia's earliest creators.
By providing a service they're calling "the PBS of the Web," the Digital Universe team hopes to create a new era of free and open access to wide swaths of information on virtually any topic.
"The vision of the Digital Universe is to essentially provide an ad-free alternative to the likes of AOL and Yahoo on the Internet," said Firmage. "Instead of building it through Web robots, we're building it through a web of experts at hundreds of institutions throughout the world." Their idea is particularly timely given recent questions about Wikipedia's accuracy and credibility. A frequently raised criticism of the constantly growing repository of information has been that the millions of articles created by a worldwide community of contributors are not verified by experts.
Of course, that has always been Wikipedia's modus operandi--that its articles are written and vetted by its community, not by an elite corps of Ph.D.s. Yet there are some who feel that while the site has a satisfying populist appeal, and may be on par with the Encyclopedia Britannica when it comes to accuracy, it still suffers from a lack of true accountability.
By including articles that have been approved by experts, Digital Universe will have such reliability, its founders say....While the Digital Universe will be free to anyone, it has a business model, Firmage said. The idea is that it will partner with nonprofit organizations including NASA, the American Museum of Natural History and U.C. Berkeley and sell Digital Universe-branded Internet service to their members. He said subscribers would pay no more than what they currently pay for Internet service, and would get the benefit of knowing that some of their fees are going to supporting the organizations, as well as the Digital Universe itself....[W]hen Digital Universe launches in January, [it will have] about a dozen subject-area portals, Firmage said, but will add a new portal every two to three weeks. According to Firmage, experts, many of whom have already been lined up, will be paid to work part-time vetting articles. The initial funding will come from $10 million raised over the last three years from angel investors and others.
To Sanger, the experts will want to be involved in the project because of its vision of being "a free, nonprofit and authoritative information resource (that has) never before been tried." Some of those involved agree.
"It will be the first Web-based information resource that combines the trustworthiness and authority of scientific review and governance with the power of Web-based collaboration, all enabled by a state-of-the-art technology platform," wrote three Ph.D.s, Cutler Cleveland, Jim Lester and Peter Saundry, the chair and vice chairs, respectively, of the project's Environmental Information Coalition.
"As such, the (Digital Universe)," they wrote in an open letter [November 8, 2005], "will be a direct conduit of objective information from scientists and educators to decision makers and civil society at large."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/19/2005 09:21:00 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.
