STOP SOPA ☣ STOP RWA
Two bills are making their way through the U.S. Congress that would have highly negative consequences for AcaWiki and the public good. Please take action against both.
Many large sites are blacked out January 18 to spur action against SOPA. Visit americancensorship.org to take action against this bill, which is a censorship and security risk for the entire internet. Wikimedia's General Counsel explains how SOPA would hurt wikis.
RWA would prohibit federal agencies from conditioning their grants to require that articles reporting on publicly funded research be made accessible to the public online. This is unjust and would specifically harm AcaWiki by greatly reducing the number of people with access to important literature — access is required to summarize. Please tell congresspeople to oppose RWA.
See AcaWiki:SOPA-RWA for planning and discussion of this message.
About
From AcaWiki
AcaWiki is like "Wikipedia for academic research" designed to collect summaries and literature reviews of peer-reviewed academic research, and make them available to the general public. AcaWiki is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with seed funding from the Hewlett Foundation. There are lots of ways to communicate about the site.
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Problem
- Cutting-edge research is occurring at breakneck speeds; however dissemination of this research is stunted. Though much of this research is publicly funded, the contents are not made accessible to the general public. Even many universities, especially those in developing countries, cannot afford the subscription fees to access standard journals.
- Most academic papers are written for other academics and often contain jargon that most people from outside a discipline may not easily understand.
Solution
AcaWiki presents a workable solution to both of these problems by making use of social software combined with a community of graduate students, academics, and citizens, to collect summaries and long abstracts of academic papers. In short, contributors write two-to-three paragraph magazine-like summaries of academic papers and contribute them to the AcaWiki pool. Because there is no copyright in ideas, this is permissible. Entries on the site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license so they are free for international distribution via the Internet or hard copy. Other contributors can annotate, comment, or append information to the original entry, adding greater nuance or clarity.
Communicate
Bugs and Features
- Please file to Bugzilla
- List of Open Bugs and Feature Requests.
Our past features and bugs were tracked at Creative Commons bugtracker and at AcaWiki:Bugs, but no longer.
Roadmap
We are Trying to Keep a community plan of action as the Roadmap. We are tracking our bugs and feature requests as #Bugs and Features, but mapping them to monthly strategies and plans for growing this project. This way, everyone can participate!
Press
- AcaWiki:Press
- Press Releases - news we released
- Press Hits - news about us
- Community News
- Press Kit and Logo Guidelines
