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  • From: Brad Phillips <bradphillips AT fabricatorz.com>
  • To: "AcaWiki general (listserv)" <acawiki-general AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [acawiki-general] PRESS RELEASE: AcaWiki Seeks Summaries of Top 100 Academic Papers
  • Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2011 15:33:42 -0500

Hi everyone,

Please help us by spreading this latest announcement around!

Cheers,
+Brad



AcaWiki Seeks Summaries of Top 100 Academic Papers

Cambridge, MA — Thursday, 16 June 2011 — The AcaWiki project has announced
their summer drive to gather summaries for the top 100 academic papers around
the world. The AcaWiki website (http://acawiki.org) features an updated logo
and theme that brings it into alignment with Wikipedia and other popular
Wikis. AcaWiki continues to make strides in improving global access and
exposure to academic research and scientific findings. When completed this
new list of top papers, along with the over 500 summaries already available,
will provide a solid base to fill the needs of many students and academics
doing research.

"Our goal for this summer is to collect a clear set of summaries of the top
papers from every field,” explained AcaWiki’s founder, Neeru Paharia. “This
is a huge task, and one that we will not be able to achieve without the
active participation of students and academics from every discipline. While
AcaWiki has a growing collection with well over 500 Creative Commons licensed
summaries of academic papers, we want more coverage in fields such as
economics, psychology, sociology, business, and computer science. In order to
do this, we need leaders, and readers, in all major fields of research to
join us.”

The AcaWiki project addresses two key problems in the public access and
understanding of modern academic research. While the overall volume of
significant, cutting-edge research is growing apace, the dissemination of
important findings and results is mostly limited to traditional,
subscription-based publishing outlets and peer-reviewed journals. Even
research that is publicly funded is often not made readily available to the
general public, while universities in developing countries are often cut off
from access to knowledge by exorbitant subscription fees for standard
journals. Since a lot of academic research is couched in jargon that can only
be understood by experts, the problem of limited access to knowledge is
compounded by a very real deficit in communication between academia and the
general public, as well as between academic disciplines themselves.

AcaWiki offers a workable solution to both of these problems by making use of
social software and leveraging a community of graduate students, academics,
and citizens, to write summaries and long abstracts of academic papers.
Contributors are encouraged to write two-to-three paragraph summaries of
academic papers and contribute them to the AcaWiki pool. Unlike the original
articles themselves, the copyright for these summaries belongs to the
contributor. AcaWiki stipulates that all entries on the site be licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution license, so they are free for
international distribution via the Internet or in hard copy. Other
contributors can annotate, comment, or append information to the original
entry, adding greater nuance or clarity.

Along with community leaders Mike Linksvayer, Jodi Schneider, Reid
Priedhorsky and others, the open production company, Fabricatorz is improving
AcaWiki and growing the project. “By updating the AcaWiki logo with the great
design by Aleksander Stachurka, we hope to crystallize the reality of the
project,” said Jon Phillips, Fabricatorz Founder. “And, by switching to the
default MediaWiki theme, as seen on all Wikimedia Foundation Wikis, we are
making it easier to be compatible with the majority of real Wiki communities
and developers. We want to collect more high quality academic summaries and
to encourage more students and researchers to use the site and help us
achieve our goal.”

The project has released a public roadmap for the next three to six months on
its website at: http://acawiki.org/Roadmap Beyond summarizing academic
papers, the Roadmap is an open plan for others to help by filing bugs and
developing plans for making AcaWiki a better resource and community.


Targeted List of Disciplines

* Anthropology
* Arts and Literarure
* Astronomy
* Biology
* Business
* Chemistry
* Clinical Research
* Computer Science
* Economics
* Education
* Engineering
* Geosciences
* Health
* Mathematics
* Medicine
* Neuroscience
* Philosophy
* Physics
* Psychology
* Sociology




For More Information

* http://acawiki.org
* http://acawiki.org/Top_100_Papers


About AcaWiki

AcaWiki is like "Wikipedia for academic research" designed to collect
summaries and literature reviews of peer-reviewed academic research, and make
them available to the general public. AcaWiki is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit
organization with seed funding from the Hewlett Foundation.


Press Contact

* Jon Phillips, press AT acawiki.org, +1.415.830.3884


Press Kit

* http://acawiki.org/about
*
http://acawiki.org/images/4/43/PRESSRELEASE-AcaWiki-Seeks-Top-100-Academic-Papers.pdf
*
http://acawiki.org/images/1/11/PRESSRELEASE-AcaWiki-Seeks-Top-100-Academic-Papers.odt

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Attachment: PRESSRELEASE-AcaWiki-Seeks-Top-100-Academic-Papers.pdf
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  • [acawiki-general] PRESS RELEASE: AcaWiki Seeks Summaries of Top 100 Academic Papers, Brad Phillips, 06/16/2011

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