[BOAI] [fyi] AcaWiki Launching

[Carolina Rossini]

The founder and friend, Neeru Paharia, asked me to send this to you.

Hope you enjoy.

Carol

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 @acawiki is launching. "Wikipedia for academic research." Post a summary of
your research to increase its impact. http://acawiki.org

*PRESS RELEASE: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE*

*AcaWiki Increases Impact of Scholarly Research Using Web 2.0*

*October 7, 2009*

Today, representatives from the new nonprofit project AcaWiki announced the
opening of their website, http://acawiki.org, to the public. AcaWiki’s
semantic-wiki based website allows scholars, students, and bloggers to
easily post summaries, and discuss academic papers online. All content
posted to the site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

AcaWiki’s mission is to make academic research more accessible and
interactive by creating a "Wikipedia for academic research." "Cutting-edge
research is often locked behind firewalls and therefore lacks impact,"
founder Neeru Paharia explains, "AcaWiki turns research hidden in academic
journals into something that is more dynamic and accessible to have a
greater influence in scholarship, and society." AcaWiki enables users to
easily post and discuss human-readable summaries of academic papers and
literature reviews online. AcaWiki also helps users to share and organize
summaries through the use of tags and RSS feeds. Vijay Kumar, senior
associate dean and director of the Office of Educational Innovation and
Technology at MIT, says, "AcaWiki can provide an important 'sense-making'
function for enabling easier sharing of knowledge that can help to build
bridges across disciplines—and even between academia and those outside."


AcaWiki’s work follows on the work of open-access publishers such as the
Public Library of Science, as well as on the tradition of using new media to
create public dialogue with science. Currently, it can cost up to $35 to
download an academic paper—a significant cost, especially because thorough
research on any topic usually entails downloading many papers. AcaWiki’s
approach takes advantage of the fact that copyright does not apply to ideas,
only to the written expression of those ideas. Scholars can thus post
summaries of their or others’ research online as long as they are not
copying verbatim beyond what fair-use laws permit. John Seely Brown, former
head of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and a leader in the open
education movement, says, "AcaWiki complements [the movement’s] work and
opens a whole new dimension of making research accessible to the public."


AcaWiki’s website is built using Semantic MediaWiki, combining the
sophistication of the semantic web with the ease-of-use of a wiki. The site
enables comments, discussion, user profiles, and tagging. Visitors can also
import and export from other reference-management tools, such as Endnote and
Zotero, via the BibTeX standard.


*More About AcaWiki*


AcaWiki is starting with seed funding from the Hewlett Foundation. Founder
Neeru Paharia is in her final year of doctoral studies at the Harvard
Business School. Previously, she was executive director of Creative Commons.
AcaWiki board members include Mike Linksvayer, vice president of Creative
Commons, and John Wilbanks, vice president of Science Commons. Librarian
Jodi Schneider, formerly employed at Appalachian State University and
Amherst College, is the community liaison.

Please direct press inquiries to Neeru Paharia at neeru at acawiki.org <mailto:
neeru at acawiki.org> or (510) 823-1073.

http://acawiki.org/AcaWiki:PressRelease-2009-10-07
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