The Chronicle: 7/5/2002: 'Superarchives' Could Hold All Scholarly Output. Quote: "Several colleges are now looking to share more of that work by building "institutional repositories" online and inviting their professors to upload copies of their research papers, data sets, and other work. The idea is to gather as much of the intellectual output of an institution as possible in an easy-to-search online collection."

Comment:The final solution will be distributed, but some interesting links in this piece.  MIT again leading the way.  If you go to most university home pages, it's usually quite a challenge to find their current research in any kind of systematic way. [Serious Instructional Technology]

A key observation from the article:

"The whole power of science is the power of shared ideas, not the power of hidden ideas," says Paul Jones, associate professor of information and library science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "Science advances when there's a free exchange of ideas. We move faster by being open. We know this, but we have disincentives right now to openness."

So, here's a gedanken experiment for you. Setup each incoming Ph.D. or Master's candidate with a weblog at the beginning of their program. Coach them to use the weblog as a lab notebook of their developing intellectual capital. Use your own weblog to comment on their work and their thinking. Where do you think these students will be after several years of sustained and steady writing? How many will have already started to establish reputations as serious thinkers?

Sure, there will be lots of resistance to the idea. It threatens many a sacred cow. Make the initial experiments local or semi-private. Long-term you're still likely to kill the existing system by substituting real-time peer review for the current unwieldy system.

10:46:02 AM •  • comment