I sent the following to 'scholar-support@google.com'. If you agree, you might send them an email yourself.
Since Google has changed the world in so many good ways, I thought you might be open to suggestions for new projects.
The traditional method of academic publishing is way too expensive and way too slow. Worst of all it's exclusive, presenting high cost barriers to those who want to access the information (I should know--one of my jobs is to administer a college library). The fact that much research is produced by public funds but then sequestered by for-profit publishing houses, is not just inefficient--it's an insult to the general population.
My suggestion: follow the lead of pre-print sites (see http://xxx.lanl.gov/ for example), many of which exist for specific disciplines. Create a software framework that can encompass that idea the same way that a 'blog' is now pretty much universally recognized. I imagine that components would include cool ways to post feedback, cross-reference, and provide permanent links to research papers. If one has to log into the system, you could even create cool ratings of papers if you wanted, by measuring not just the number of hits on a page, but how important those eyeballs are by examining how that person's profile corresponds to everyone else's (the kind of thing Google excels at).
A standard, reliable implementation with a central index has the potential to revolutionize research by making it truly a democratic marketplace of ideas.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
-
The student/faculty ratio, which represents on average how many students there are for each faculty member, is a common metric of educationa...
-
(A parable for academic workers and those who direct their activities) by David W. Kammler, Professor Mathematics Department Southern Illino... -
The annual NACUBO report on tuition discounts was covered in Inside Higher Ed back in April, including a figure showing historical rates. (... -
In the last article , I showed a numerical example of how to increase the accuracy of a test by splitting it in half and judging the sub-sco... -
Introduction Stephen Jay Gould promoted the idea of non-overlaping magisteria , or ways of knowing the world that can be separated into mutu... -
I'm scheduled to give a talk on grade statistics on Monday 10/26, reviewing the work in the lead article of JAIE's edition on grades... -
Introduction Within the world of educational assessment, rubrics play a large role in the attempt to turn student learning into numbers. ... -
"How much data do you have?" is an inevitable question for program-level data analysis. For example, assessment reports that attem... -
Inside Higher Ed today has a piece on " The Rise of Edupunk ." I didn't find much new in the article, except that perhaps mai... -
Introduction A few days ago , I listed problems with using rubric scores as data to understand learning. One of these problems is how to i...
No comments:
Post a Comment