[Office-commits] r10044 - trunk/campaigns/pipeline

[sysadmin]

Author: www-data
Date: Wed Oct  7 14:39:20 2009
New Revision: 10044

Log:
web commit by holmes

Added:
   trunk/campaigns/pipeline/acawikiblogpost.mdwn

Added: trunk/campaigns/pipeline/acawikiblogpost.mdwn
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2009        (r10044)
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+# Title
+
+AcaWiki uses free software--and a free software approach--to liberate 
scientific research.
+
+# Description
+
+AcaWiki is an ingenious new project to build a body of scientific knowledge 
that is free to use, study, improve, and redistribute. Instead of waiting for 
journals to make papers more available, they're building a free equivalent that 
will be just as useful.
+
+# Body
+
+Even though sharing knowledge is one of the most basic principles of science, 
and even though much scientific research is funded by public institutions or 
universities, the vast majority of scientific papers end up in inaccessible 
troves controlled by private journals.  [AcaWiki](http://acawiki.org) is a 
brand new project to change that.
+
+From their announcement: "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."
+
+In other words, who needs an expensive journal subscription when you can get 
long, meticulously detailed summaries for free?  Summaries can be written by 
any community member with access to the original article, or by the original 
team of researchers themselves.  Even if academics face strong incentives or 
requirements to publish in private journals, nothing in copyright law prohibits 
them from republishing a summary elsewhere.
+
+AcaWiki is built on [Semantic MediaWiki](http://semantic-mediawiki.org/), 
which is free software available under the GNU GPL (it's the same software the 
FSF uses for [LibrePlanet](http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/Main_Page).  But beyond 
just using free software, AcaWiki takes a free software approach: rather than 
waiting for journals make papers more available, they're organizing a community 
of experts to build a free equivalent that will be just as useful to students 
and scholars.
+
+If you'd like to be an advocate for AcaWiki in your institution, or help 
summarize key papers in your field of expertise, [get 
involved](http://acawiki.org).