Academics at Oxford, Cambridge, Strathclyde and Dundee universities will be among the first UK-based contributors to a new online [and OA] encyclopedia written and edited entirely by experts.
The Encyclopedia of Earth (EoE), an online reference resource for all things environmental, will be written by academics approved by a panel of scientists, who will also ‘peer-review’ their contributions. Cutler J Cleveland, the EoE’s editor-in-chief, said this approach meant its accuracy could be trusted by students, lecturers, librarians and teachers unlike the collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which anybody can contribute to and edit. He said: “Wikipedia has proved to be very successful at generating huge amounts of good content by letting anyone contribute. The problem is there is a lot of bad content too. We are trying to combine the good aspects of Wikipedia, like the technology, with some of the more traditional quality control that you’d find in academic scholarship.”
Expected to launch in June 2006, the EoE is the first part of the Digital Universe project, which will offer online information free from commercial advertising, including encyclopedias on other subjects, blogs and podcasts from academics and links to relevant websites and databases.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/09/2006 06:04:00 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.
