...Pronetos.com, or the “Professor’s Network,” will be a community for scholars, where professors can meet to share ideas and course material, and peer review scholarly work....
“The Web was built for academics to collaborate, but it’s never been used productively yet,” said [creator Chris Blanchard].
Universities that have attempted to build an online community usually give the work to a neglected IT department. The results are fairly rudimentary – not much more than a moderated forum, Blanchard said.
Even the universities that succeed in building their own social network are “siloed” – there’s not an easy way for the users of a community in one university to interact with an online community somewhere else....
Blanchard used the Pronetos blog to get the word about his plan to make scholarly work available to review, for free.
It’s a popular idea inside academia – putting peer-reviewed material on the Internet for free....There’s a lot of blog activity on open access, which Pronetos linked to, Blanchard said....
Soon, Blanchard said, professors from large universities, including Harvard and Yale, were signing up to use the Beta version of Pronetos.
Blanchard said his end game for the site is to make it a digital repository of academic work, and eventually make Pronetos a digital publishing company....
Blanchard said he won’t be selling ad space on the site itself. His business plan is to remix the content that’s aggregated on Pronetos and resell it in custom text books or electronic copy....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/05/2007 10:00:00 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.
