Rice University and IBM are developing an open-standards architecture to integrate OA repositories with other open-source academic tools like courseware packages. From the press release (undated but apparently October 7, 2006):
Rice University and IBM will collaborate on the development of an open-standards-based service-oriented architecture (SOA) that will help higher education institutions tie together their increasingly diverse academic software applications.
The collaboration is supported in part by IBM's Shared University Research (SUR) award program, created to exemplify the deep partnership between academia and the industry to explore research in areas essential to innovation....
"In academia today, discrete, open-source, academic applications such as courseware management systems, digital libraries and content commons are becoming central to the life of a university," said Kamran Khan, vice provost for information technology. "It is important to tie these stand-alone applications together into a more coherent whole."
IBM's gift will enable Rice to collaborate in the research and development of an open-standards-based SOA for higher education called the Rice Open Collaborative Learning Environment (Open-CLE) [PS: no web site yet]. Rice will provide a working demonstration environment to validate the approach. "The open architecture resulting from this work will help institutions collaborate on research efforts and tie together their academic applications," said Tony Befi, IBM senior state executive for Texas. "It also will make it easier for institutions to deploy and for individuals to use open-source, online, research and education tools." ...
Rick Peterson, director for academic and research computing at Rice, is eager to capitalize on open standards systems. "Rice is already utilizing great, individual, open source/open standards-based tools such as D-Space, Sakai and Connexions. With this new research project, made possible by the IBM grant, we can create a framework that will allow these applications to operate well together...."
"The SUR grant is a big step forward for open education," said Richard Baraniuk, Victor E. Cameron Professor in Engineering and founder of Connexions. "Fusing Sakai, Connexions and DSpace will make it easy for large and small educational institutions to get involved in this important movement." ...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/09/2006 02:47:00 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.
