Introducing the Open Research Society

12. Oktober 2007 um 09:52 Keine Kommentare

After a short break at the MTSR 2007 in which I got to know Panayiota Polydoratou yesterday (greetings to Traugott Koch!), Miltiadis Lytras introduced the Open Research Society (ORS) and raised some important general questions: Why do we do research? Who can benefit from our research? Which alternatives to the current system of publication and review exist? How can we overcome the digital divide? The Open Research Society will also participates in the Open Knowledge Summit in Athens (24-26 September 2008) and it is going to publish a couple of new Open Access journals – have a look at their website and welcome this new organization in the area of Open Access and Open Content!

Miguel-Angel Sicilia explained the ORS plans in more detail with his presentation From open access to open research and information sustainability. The proposed ORS Journals (which ORS should not be limited to) are going to be full open access without author fees and all research data must be provided. Peer review is planned to be double-blind but there will be additional experiments with other review methods to find out how peer review could be changed. Sicilia also talked about Open Access and Information Sustainability which is a hard challenge given the explosion of publication.

My first impression of the Open Research Society is very promising – we should collaborate with Science Commons, Wikimedia and similar projects!