CUNY Discussion/Meetings/Working Group?

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  Posted by Alycia Sellie (she/her/they) on December 4, 2011 at 1:47 pm

  Hi All,

  After this year’s Open Access Week and the CUNY IT conference, I’m finding more and more folks who are interested to both learn more about OA and have more conversations across CUNY. Are there people on this list who would like to start meeting in person and brainstorming about further actions (CUNY mandates, workshops, Open Access Week, etc.)?

• Marcos Wasem

  Participant

  January 19, 2012 at 12:56 pm

  I foresee a more heated debate on which platform to choose in order to build our digital OA repositories, whether the Academic Commons (written on top of BuddyPress), Omeka or Open Journal Systems (to name a few of the platforms currently used at the GC that we’ve discussed yesterday). The good thing is that we can have them all, and as long as they are F/LOSS we are free to install and modify them for our own purposes. I don’t agree with the criticism raised by @sklein against OJS at the meeting. In fact, since I started using it five years ago, the number of journals has multiplied and there have been installations of the platform in other CUNY campuses as well. From my point of view as a user, one of the main advantages of OJS has to do with the built-in capabilities for meta-data embedding and indexing. In the case of LLJournal, published in Spanish, Portuguese and English, its multilingual support is also critical, although this can be very specific to our Program needs. Both Omeka and OJS have an implementation of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (http://dublincore.org/metadata-basics/ ; http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/wiki/index.php/Taxonomies_and_Metadata) built in, a feature critical in an academic environment; in the case of BuddyPress, however, there still work to be done (this goes to our fellow coders). For instance, not every page at the Commons provides COinS metadata, only individual blogs can do it by enabling the proper WordPress plug-in. To expose metadata everywhere shouldn’t be big deal, but my point is that each platform is good for what it has been geared towards: OJS for peer-reviewed scholarly publishing, BuddyPress as a social network and blogging platform, Omeka seems to me that has been created with the model of a museum in mind. In my view, instead of trying to make a catch-all platform to all our academic needs, we should better integrate what already exists and is being used at CUNY.
  Jill Cirasella (she/her)

  Member

  January 19, 2012 at 1:28 pm

  Stephen, Virginia Commonwealth’s resolution to factor in the added value of OA is the only one I know of. There may well be other resolutions along those lines, but I don’t think it’s common. So far, most resolutions and mandates just address making materials OA, not the promotion and tenure aspects of going OA.
  Stephen Klein

  Member

  January 19, 2012 at 1:28 pm

  To clarify: i did not criticize OJS. I was merely re-iterating Steve brier’s comment about OJS’s need for funding and the impression of a group that I am working with of OJS’s clunkiness. Also, I am a big fan of Omeka.