The University of California at Los Angeles will unveil plans on Friday for what appears to be the world's first online, peer-reviewed encyclopedia devoted to ancient Egypt. The UCLA Encyclopedia of Egypt, which won a $325,000 grant this month from the National Endowment for the Humanities, will include material in Arabic as well as English....Users can preview the site [here]. During the project's first phase, which will take about two years, the editorial team plans to commission and publish some 650 entries. The first commissions will go out this summer, and some contributions may be up on the site as early as this fall, depending on how long they take to navigate the writing and peer-review process....In time, the encyclopedia will contain as many as 4,000 entries alongside a wealth of visual materials: terms in hieroglyphs, maps, photographs. Anyone with a Web browser will be able to use the English-language "open version," which will include abstracts in Arabic. A fuller version will provide, for a fee, complete Arabic translations along with such frills as three-dimensional "virtual reality" models of temples and other historical sites. "We have to be self-sustaining," Ms. Wendrich says, explaining the split-level system. "We have to create some kind of income." She points out that anyone with an Egyptian e-mail address will be able to browse the enhanced version gratis. "It's very important that Egypt has access to its culture and heritage," she says.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/24/2006 03:56:00 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.
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.
