Monday, March 01, 2004

More on Cornell's Internet-First University Press. Scott Carlson, Cornell Tries a New Publishing Model: Scholarship on Demand, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 5, 2004 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: "Cornell University has started a publishing venture that will provide scholarly publications online free, offering readers the option to pay for a printed copy. Officials at Cornell hope that the publishing model will be one that other colleges will adopt, reducing their dependence on costly journals and trimming the need for storage space. The project, called the Internet-First University Press, is one of the first to utilize DSpace, a free software tool designed by programmers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to archive scholarly works....One of the press's main challenges, Mr. Cooke says, is convincing faculty members that the Internet model of publishing is just as valuable as publishing in established journals. All of the professors who have signed on so far are tenured, Mr. Cooke says, adding that he used his status as a former dean of the faculty to win them over." [Open Access News] 9:00:25 AM      Google It!.

MeetingWizard.com. http://www.meetingwizard.com/ This isn't really an 'ed tech' related post, more a public service to anyone who has had to suffer through one of my personal pet bugaboos - phone calls and meetings to schedule future meetings. Yes, you read that right - the amount of time I spend trying to schedule meetings is simply ridiculous. So if you are charged with setting up a meeting for busy folks (and who isn't these days) and these people don't all work for the same organization (and thus already have access to a common calendaring system) I have a simple URL for you - meetingwizard.com! I'm sure there are other such systems out there; this isn't necessarily an endorsement of this particular one, it's simply one that I've used with success and that is free! So look around if you don't like this one and find another - but please pay attention to the idea. To book a meeting simply 1)enter in up to 12 proposed meeting times 2)enter in the email addresses of the invitees 3)send the invites out. The site then allows each of the invitees to check off which of the times could work for them and the ones they absolutely can't make. It tallies the results and lets you see which dates are likely to work best. You can indicate specific participants as 'critical' whose absence would derail a meeting, and the software can 'autoconfirm' when an appropriate date is found or lets you manually notify people of the details. Sounds simple? It is. And free. So why do I keep getting these calls to try and schedule more calls? - SWL [EdTechPost] 8:54:34 AM      Google It!.