Open peer review—which gives anyone who’s interested a chance to weigh in on scholarly content before it’s published—just got an institutional boost. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has given New York University Press and MediaCommons a $ 50,000 grant to take a closer look at open, or peer-to-peer (P2P), review, the press announced today. MediaCommons is a digital scholarly network hosted by the NYU Libraries and affiliated with the Institute for the Future of the Book.

The idea of P2P review has generated a lot of interest in the humanities lately. Last year, for instance, Shakespeare Quarterly tried its first-ever open peer review experiment with a special issue on Shakespeare and new media. That went well enough that the journal decided to try it again, this time with a forthcoming issue on Shakespeare and performance.

Thanks to the Mellon money, over the next year representatives from MediaCommons and the NYU Press and libraries will meet with an advisory board of scholars and…

Wired Campus

A new study suggests that while open access appears to increase the readership of scholarly articles, it doesn’t increase how often they’re cited.

The study stands in contrast with earlier research that suggested open-access articles were referenced by other scholars more frequently.

Philip M. Davis, a postdoctoral associate in the department of communication at Cornell University, was given access to 36 subscription-based journals produced by seven different publishers. In 2007 and early 2008, he randomly made approximately 20 percent of their articles free.

He tracked the number of abstract views, full-text downloads, PDF downloads, and citations within the next year for the 3,245 articles in the study. The findings were published Wednesday in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal.

Free articles were downloaded more than twice as frequently as the paid-access articles, and PDFs of the free articles were downloaded 1.6 times more frequently.

But…

Wired Campus

Registration is officially open for the next session of Marketing for Makers!

I learned a lot the first time I taught the Marketing for Makers e-course in the fall of 2010. The biggest thing I learned is that fall is a terrible time to run a marketing e-course aimed at makers!

If you’re like most makers, fall is your busy season. There are fall craft shows to do, and inventory to produce in anticipation of the holidays, which for most of us is the time we make our best money for the year.

You don’t have time to be learning about marketing. You need to already have a marketing plan you can put into action!

Which is why this upcoming session of Marketing for Makers will be the last time I offer this course in 2011!

I want to make sure that you’ve got a solid marketing strategy in place so that you can take advantage of the busiest retail time of the year. That’s why the course is scheduled to wrap the last week of June (it starts April 4th). That should give you plenty of time…

Crafting an MBA

Lets talk about the supposedly free and open Web again, not ‘again’ in the sense that it has been discussed too much or too abundantly but in the sense that maybe new and other frameworks have to be introduced or at least need to be considered. While I am not trying to speak on anybody’s behalf, certainly when following Latour’ Actor Network Theory principles, taking a look at the politics behind the phenomenon could make a contribution to the discussion about it.

When talking about Production with a big ‘p’ on this new Web we can identify, like in every discussion, two groups of people with a different point of view on it: those who applaud it and those who want to make us aware of the dangers and pitfalls. It is a battle between authors like Bruns stressing an authentic culture that can be traced back to Dadaism and works like those of Marcel Duchamps’ Fountain and Benkler & Nissembaum who see production as a means for creating and expressing virtue much in Aristotlean sense.

A…

Masters of Media

This is a conference for high school CS teachers, sponsored by CSTA.

Register Now for CSTA’s Annual CS&IT Conference

July 11, 12, & 13, 2011 Columbia University, New York

July 11: Hands-on Workshops

July 12:  Keynotes and Breakouts

July 13: Imagine Cup Activities

You are cordially invited to attend the 11^h annual Computer Science & Information Technology Symposium at Columbia University Faculty House in New York, NY!

This CSTA conference is a professional development opportunity for computer science and information technology teachers who need practical, classroom focused information to help them prepare their students for the future.

Symposium Opportunities for Learning:

Take advantage of this opportunity for relevant professional development!

• Explore issues and trends relating directly to your classroom
• Network with top professionals from across the country
• Interact with other teachers to gain new perspectives on shared challenges

Act now to register for Symposium 2011 at:

Computing Education Blog

Instructure, a course-management software company that recently won a large contract in Utah, announced on Tuesday that it would make most of its software platform available for free under an open-source license.

Instructure is one of a wave of new entrants into an increasingly competitive market for learning-management software in higher education. The company’s year-old Canvas platform allows instructors and students to manage course materials, grades, and discussions online.

In offering its basic software for free, the company could offer new competition for Moodle and Sakai, the two main existing open-source platforms. Like commercial arms of those platforms, Instructure intends to make money from colleges by supporting, hosting, and extending its software.

In December, the company won a bid to provide software to a collection of Utah colleges that serve roughly 110,000 students, provoking a lawsuit from a competitor that lost that bid, Desire2Learn. The suit was quickly…

Wired Campus