repositories for the rest of us: Cool idea

2008/04/15: Cool idea

Chris Rusbridge of Digital Curation Blog wishes for the submission of an open x open x open x open paper to the 4th International Digital Curation Conference. Open as in open authorship, open data-input, open metadata-output, and open access, but not explicitly open source. But, I think it's pretty safe to presume that open source would be desirable too. The conference is, after all, about digital curation. Open source code is in the best interests of digital curationists. And "Radical Sharing" is a key topic of the conference.

It will be fun to watch this one develop should anybody choose to run with it. I wonder what tool one would use to do what Rusbridge suggests. I haven't had much time to play with such tools myself. I've had Sophie installed on my Mac since the first release and have yet to write something with it. And then there is CommentPress. My WordPress skills are so sad that I created this blog with Blogger (and yes, I know I could have used wordpress.com) It's too bad OCS and OJS don't seem to have any co-authoring tools, near as I can tell from skimming their executive summary documentation. I wonder how well a Sophie or CommentPress authored document would integrate with an OCS or OJS? If it were me writing, I'd probably have everybody use GoogleDocs. It's probably got the lowest barrier of entry in terms of needing tech-savvy to collaborate.

I also begin to wonder which tools are being used by researchers in subject disciplines to create collaboratively authored papers. I suspect that its still MS Word or Adobe Acrobat and their commenting features or, for more technical disciplines, TeX and LaTeX or some other PostScript derived thingamabob. It would be interesting to do a local inventory of what people use at MPOW -- especially as we migrate to ePrints3 and try to figure out new services to develop in support of our researchers here.

Labels: dcc-2008, metadata, open access, open data, open scholarship, open source