<nettime-ann> [Press] PRESS RELEASE: AcaWiki Seeks Summaries of Top 100 Academic Papers

[Fabricatorz Press <press@fabricatorz.com>]

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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@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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