|
 |
Thursday, July 29, 2004 |
Zerhouni supports NIH OA plan. Paula Park, NIH research to be open access,
The Scientist, July 29, 2004. Excerpt: "National Institutes of Health
(NIH) director Elias Zerhouni indicated at a gathering of 43 scientific
journal publishers and editors Wednesday (July 28) that eventually all
NIH-financed research will be freely available to the public. Zerhouni
stopped short of setting deadlines for depositing full-text materials
in the searchable PubMed database, as recommended in a House
Appropriations Committee report released earlier this month. Instead,
he asked the publishing executives to inform him how best to manage
material so that the public can freely use it. 'The public needs to
have access to what they've paid for,' Zerhouni told commercial and
nonprofit publishing executives at a meeting he called on the NIH
campus. Congress, he said, also demanded evidence of the agency's
productivity. 'I need to manage the portfolio,' he said. 'The status
quo just can't stand.' " [Open Access News]
11:02:19 AM  .
|
|
Utah Education Network implementing North Plains asset management system. http://www.northplains.com/media/pr072704.asp
I wouldn't normally carry a news release like this but I have a bit
of a personal connection with this story - the folks from UEN were
partners in the recent project I did with WCET to research a number of
learning object repository software packages, and based on their urging
one of those packages ended up being NorthPlain's Telescope product.
But I think the story is more generally significant because it adds
a spin to the standard 'repository' players. NorthPlains is a Canadian
company that has made its fortune selling 'digital asset management'
software to large media companies, specifically ones like Sony
Pictures. While it isn't purpose built for higher ed learning objects
per se, it offers quite impressive functionality for dealing with media
assets in general. And given its flexibility to deal with multiple
metadata schemas or any type of workflow and its smart integration with
a host of 3rd party authoring tools, it's actually not so hard to see
how software like this (and there are a fair number of other packages
in this space, all fairly mature when compared to some of the LOR
stuff) can serve as the basis for a LOR play. In fact, in that WCET
project (results of which will be published in the fall), of the 6
products we looked at, only one could be said to be a 'learning object
repository' in the strictest sense - in addition to North Plains, the
others were variously a 'learning content management system,' an
'institutional repository,' an 'Education Institution Content
Management System' and finally a 'digital content management'
originating from the library world. All of which, to varying degrees of
success, could fulfil the role of learning object repository, proving
yet again how slippery a beast those are. - SWL [EdTechPost]
9:11:45 AM Google It!.
|
|
Postsecondary Electronic Standards Council. http://www.pesc.org/
I was actually pretty pleased about the fact that when a colleague
mentioned this group to me, I had never heard of them before. It meant
to me that I have created sufficient distance with any 'administrative
computing' past. The PESC seems to be the domain of registrars and
student service (eg. financial aid) folks, but I thought I'd post it
because you never know when one of your projects might need to be aware
of this alternate universe. Mostly they seem focused on issues like how
to ship student transcripts around, though an upcoming conference on
the "State of e-Authentication in Higher Education" seemed slightly
relevant. - SWL [EdTechPost]
9:08:30 AM Google It!.
|
|
© Copyright 2004 Bruce Landon.
|
