About

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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.

Problem

  1. 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.
  2. 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

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

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