Grants:IEG/STM Lab

status: withdrawn

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eligibility and selection criteria

project:

STM Lab

project contact:

cvr@sayahna.org

participants:

CV Radhakrishnan, GS Krishna

summary:

Empower authors/scientists to publish their research output

2013 round 1

Project idea

Research in the disciplines of science, technology and medicine (STM) are usually funded by the taxpayer. However, results of research in the form of scientific articles are transferred to publishers along with copyrights to facilitate publishing, who in turn, close these documents behind paywalls and allow public access only through hefty subscriptions. The taxpayer has to pay again to read the results of research even after funding to generate the same. This project aims at creating a framework using MediaWiki to empower authors to publish their scientific results that has a lot of technical, graphic and math content, by themselves. Added features are an area to generate charts (gnuplot, R, etc), typeset articles (TeX and friends), generate graphics (pstricks, tikz, asymptote, metapost, etc), deliberate about content among collaborators and review content by experts, all these happening in cloud in MediaWiki. In short, it becomes the biggest collaboration framework away from the physical lab once the experiments and physical processes are completed. Open access of the scientific content thusly generated is surely envisaged and is a fundamental objective.

Project goals

• Open access of STM content once published.
• Document processing and engineering framework for authors without dependance on proprietary software.
• Empower authors to publish themselves that help free knowledge from getting trapped behind paywalls.
• Biggest scientific discussion forum by real scientists which helps furtherance of future scientific research.

Project plan

Scope:

Scope and activities

• We will spend enough time on this project — architecting, coding, testing, documenting, etc.
• At the end of the project, we will end up writing a fully customizable framework based on MediaWiki for authors to use it as a collaborative platform for publishing.

Tools, technologies, and techniques

• Computer hardware
• Hired programming resources
• Hired document writer, copy editor
• Scientist volunteers to real life testing

Budget:

Total amount requested

US$ 25,000

Budget breakdown

• Project management: US$ 2,500
• Hardware: US$ 2,500
• Hired programmers: US$ 17,500 (250 hours of programming assistance @ US$ 70.00 per hour)
• Hired document writer/copy editor: US$ 2,500

Intended impact:

Target audience

Academics, scientists and technologists.

Fit with strategy

• Open access of scientific content which are now vaulted behind paywalls.
• More authors who do not use WikiMedia for disseminating their content will make use of it.
• Dependance on proprietary software to generate good quality content can be done away with.
• Authors becoming empowered to publish will help free knowledge from proprietary publishers.

Sustainability

Local asssitance can be secured once the project gets released to the world.

Measures of success

• The basic metrics is the number of scientific articles published through this medium.

Participant(s)

• CV Radhakrishnan (CVR) has been associated with academic publishing for the last two decades. Affiliated to River Valley Technologies as developer of TeX packages for processing heavy math content for journals of Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group, Cambridge University Press, Institute of Physics Publishing, etc. He is one of the founders of Indian TeX Users Group, has released several LaTeX packages like, pdfscreen, pdftricks, grid, pdfx, bibcheck, pdfslide, pdfdiff, etc., under free licence, currently maintains TeX4ht, the LaTeX to HTML/MathML translator.

• GS Krishna (GSK) is a film maker by training, a graphics specialist, enagaged in documenting and digitizing human heritage in its various forms and splendour. Currently he is in the process of setting up web pages and generating printable PDF documents about temples of south India, particularly, Kerala with special emphasis on the myths and legends surrounding each temple, for public consumption. A prototype of his work can be seen at Pradakshina.

Discussion

Community Notification:

Please paste a link to where the relevant communities have been notified of this proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions, here.

Sayahna

Endorsements:

Do you think this project should be selected for an Individual Engagement Grant? Please add your name and rationale for endorsing this project in the list below. Other feedback, questions or concerns from community members are also highly valued, but please post them on the talk page of this proposal.

• Community member: add your name and rationale here.

• Dominik Wujastyk, University of Vienna (wujastyk at gmail dot com): I am familiar with C. V. Radhakrishnan's past professional work in typesetting and his technical projects in developing specialist packages for use with TeX. I have every confidence that the technical basis of this project will be innovative and carried out to the highest professional standards. The combination into a single platform of text-origination, collaborative writing, and complex-text representation is extremely exciting. What interests me particularly is the innovative thinking that Radhakrishnan presents as a response to a widely-perceived problem in contemporary academic publishing. This problem has been articulated in many forums, and the most general responses have been the development of Open Access policies by major grant-awarding bodies such as the NIH, the Wellcome Trust, the Austrian Science Fund, the UK Research Councils, and others. It is clear that the momentum behind the Open Access is now unstoppable. The idea is ethical and principled. Yet many real problems remain at the level of implementation, and in the area of business models for publishers. Where traditional publishing models tended to favour authors, the new OA models favour readers, and place new and often unwelcome financial burdens on authors and on their employers and funders. And in this period of change, some major publishers are proposing and implementing new OA business models that are financially as unsustainable for the research community as were the old models. Completely new business models for scientific knowledge dissemination have been demonstrated by such developments as Plos, Cornell University's arXiv and peerJ. The project proposed above by Radhakrishnan and G. S. Krishna has the potential to take its place amongst these new and radical models, by placing the tools for high-quality document preparation, publication and dissemination directly in the hands of creative scientists.
• Shubho Roy: I think well organised and elegantly typeset scientific information will lead to greater consumption of scientific knowledge.
• Karl Berry: as a long-time TeX developer and technical editor, I have seen research publication become more and more about corporations making their profits and less and less about disseminating knowledge. Hence my support.
• Lian Tze Lim: MediaWiki is a great platform for collaborative content management. This project will build on top of the MediaWiki platform by providing editing and typesetting tools for researchers to present their work and results, via the same collaborative, open access paradigm. Knowledge shared is knowledge gained!
• Grant Petty: As a physical scientist and university professor who also is involved in technical publishing, I have become very aware of the way in which the scientific community has become a "cash cow" for publishers through the use of free content and review services provided by experts to generate journal articles and books sold back to the community at a very high premium. This proposal seeks to change the model of scientific publishing, and its authors have an excellent understanding of both the technology and the potential application of that technology to help make that change happen. I strongly support this effort.
• Rishi: From the support calls of authors who uses L^AT_EX to typeset their articles, I can understand that many are new to T_EX. They just know that the packages for typesetting are available at http://.... They often came back with questions as to where to copy these, how to use these, which editor should I use etc. even if the instruction on publisher's web page says they should have the minimum knowledge about T_EX and they need T_EX in their systems etc. So yes, I think this platform will be a good relief for those authors. They can at least avoid the head-ache of installing T_EX and copying packages.
• Vijay: Given the fact that most research is funded from public money, the proposed project will contribute to the concept of free knowledge dissemination which everyone (at least openly) endorse. Left to myself I strongly endorse the project.