Researchers at Pennsylvania State University at University Park plan to unveil today free software that attempts to turn the peer-to-peer technology often used by music pirates into a tool for professors to legitimately share large data sets, high-resolution images from their research, and other educational files. The software -- called LionShare -- will be released at a meeting of members of Internet2, the high-speed networking consortium. And it will be made available to colleges by the end of September, according to Michael J. Halm, senior strategist for Penn State's Teaching and Working With Technology office. The software, financed in part by a $1.1-million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, was about two years in the making. A number of college officials have awaited LionShare's release because the program could help professors establish their own online reserves. It allows users to search one another's digital collections of documents, images, and other academic material and view specific files....Professors can use the software to make files available only to students registered for their courses, for example. And users can organize their own digital collections by affixing keyword descriptions, known as metadata, to individual items.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/20/2005 11:20:00 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.
