Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Stanford University News recently published an update about its very heavily visited website: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The article's author, Cynthia Haven, stresses the authoritativeness of the Encyclopedia which was launched in 1995, years before both Google and Wikipedia. Visited over 700,000 times a week, the Encyclopedia has more than 1,200 entries authored by over 1,400 individuals. Contribtions are overseen by 120 leading philosophers from all over the world while Stanford's Dept. of Philosophy is the advisory board. Thus, "[N]o one can alter text without passing through several layers of approval."

Excerpts:

It's September, and as school resumes, so does the wrangling between students and teachers across the country over the reliability of Wikipedia and other Internet sources as fodder for footnotes in research papers.

The debate has been going on for years. When philosopher Larry Sanger left Wikipedia – the project he co-founded – he said its "anti-elitism" was the root of its shortcomings. He said that because pretty much anyone could write anything, expertise was mistrusted and those committed to mayhem or propaganda could too easily dominate the medium.

But he did recommend an online alternative: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. . . .

The Latest Version of Open Access Bibliography Available

Here is Charles Bailey's announcement about the online publication of his bibliography of material on open access and its effect on academic scholarship:

Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A
Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship:

http://digital-scholarship.org/tsp/transforming.htm

This bibliography presents over 1,100 selected
English-language scholarly works useful in understanding the
open access movement's efforts to provide free access to and
unfettered use of scholarly literature. The bibliography
primarily includes books and published journal articles. A
limited number of book chapters, conference papers,
dissertations and theses, magazine articles, technical
reports, and other scholarly works that are deemed to be of
exceptional interest are also included (see the "Preface"
for further details about selection criteria). The
bibliography includes links to freely available versions of
included works. Most sources have been published from
January 1, 1999 through August 1, 2010; however, a limited
number of key sources published prior to 1999 are also
included. The bibliography is available as a paperback and
an open access PDF file.

The following Digital Scholarship publications may also be
of interest:

(1) Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, version 78

http://digital-scholarship.org/sepb/sepb.html

(2) Digital Scholarship 2009 (paperback and open access PDF
file)

http://digital-scholarship.org/sepb/annual/ds2009.htm

(3) Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2008
Annual Edition (paperback, Kindle e-book, and open access
PDF file)

http://digital-scholarship.org/sepb/annual/sepb2008.htm

(4) Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography,
version 1

http://digital-scholarship.org/dcpb/dcpb.htm

Translate (oversatta, oversette, prelozit, traducir,
traduire, tradurre, traduzir, or ubersetzen):

http://digital-scholarship.org/announce/tsp.htm

The Open Access Imperative

Katharine Dunn, Dean's Editorial Fellow, Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science, provides a good overview of the history, the present state, and the importance of the Open Access movement. It's entitled "The Open Access Imperative".

Open Access Monograph Publishing

Maria Bonn, associate university librarian for publishing at the University of Michigan Library, has published "Free exchange of ideas: Experimenting with the open access monograph" in the latest issue of College & Research Libraries News. It's an interesting article that stresses the differences between OA journal and OA book publishing. Though a strong proponent of the latter, Bonn provides an excellent analysis of the challenges, as well as the opportunities, of applying open access models to monograph publishing.

SPARC Open Access Newsletter (Sept. issue)

Peter Suber published today (September 2, 2010 ) the latest issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter (issue #149).