“OpenSpeaks was born as an umbrella project that ties together all my activities related to open resources and native language documentation.”
Category Archives: oa.languages
Digitising archives, sharing knowledge | Interview | Nepali Times
“The South Asia Materials Project is now digitising as the means of preservation, and many of the resources are being made available online. Further, the newly formed South Asia Open Archives initiative is laying plans for massive efforts to digitise and make available important cultural resources for open access.”
Public access to historical records now more accessible -as National Archives continues digitisation process
“Historical records are being made more accessible to students and members of the public as the process of digitisation of valuable primary source documents continues. Archivist at the National Archives of Guyana, Department of Culture, Ministry of Social Cohesion, Ms. Nadia Gamel-Carter, today, provided this update at the opening of the Archives Week Exhibition. The week-long exhibition dedicated to the commemoration of the Centenary Anniversary for the Abolition of Indentureship targets secondary and tertiary students and aims to raise awareness about the genealogical research and other services that the agency provides.”
[English > Any] For anyone who supports the open-access movement in academia… : translator
“If you want to make a difference and help expand the open-access movement across the world, please send a translation of the above document to the listed email (little.prince@custodians.online). If your language is already listed, feel free to check if there are any corrections that can be made, and send those instead! The present ones are oftentimes not completely error-free.”
What do you call a homepage? Incorporating indigenous knowledge into Wikipedia – Wikimedia Blog
“First Nation in Canada may soon have a Wikipedia to call their own.
The Atikamekw Nehirowisiw Nation, located in central Quebec, is one of the few aboriginal peoples in Canada where virtually the entire population still speaks the language, making it among the most vibrant among the First Nations.
An ongoing project, the first of its kind in Canada, is working with the Atikamekw community to develop Wikipedia content in their own language. The initiative’s goal is to one day have the Atikamekw Wikipedia, currently in the Wikimedia incubator join one of the hundreds of extant Wikipedias.
‘It is a way to pass on ancestral knowledge using computers and it allows to preserve traditional practices,” project member Nehirowisiw says. ‘It is an educational tool for all.'”
Sharing Data and Materials in Psychological Science – Apr 17, 2017
“Psychological Science is now introducing some minor changes designed to increase the frequency and ease with which editors and reviewers of submissions can access data and materials as part of the peer-review process. I anticipate that, in addition to enhancing the review process, these changes will further increase the percentage of Psychological Science articles for which researchers can quickly and easily access data and materials postpublication. The changes we are introducing are tweaks and nudges, not radical shifts. In the following, I explain the changes and why they are worth undertaking.”
[1703.05539] The coverage of Microsoft Academic: Analyzing the publication output of a university
Abstract: “This is the first in-depth study on the coverage of Microsoft Academic (MA). The coverage of a verified publication list of a university was analyzed on the level of individual publications in MA, Scopus, and Web of Science (WoS). Citation counts were analyzed and issues related to data retrieval and data quality were examined. A Perl script was written to retrieve metadata from MA. We find that MA covers journal articles, working papers, and conference items to a substantial extent. MA surpasses Scopus and WoS clearly with respect to book-related document types and conference items but falls slightly behind Scopus with regard to journal articles. MA shows the same biases as Scopus and WoS with regard to the coverage of the social sciences and humanities, non-English publications, and open-access publications. Rank correlations of citation counts are high between MA and the benchmark databases. We find that the publication year is correct for 89.5% of all publications and the number of authors for 95.1% of the journal articles. Given the fast and ongoing development of MA, we conclude that MA is on the verge of becoming a bibliometric superpower. However, comprehensive studies on the quality of MA data are still lacking.”
How Do You Know Which Medical Information on Wikipedia to Trust? | KQED Future of You | KQED Science
“Reworking Wikipedia health entries is not a trivial task. A 2014 study found about 25,000 pages of English-language health-related articles. That number is now up to 32,000, Heilman says. The health pages worldwide attracted almost 4.9 billion pageviews in 2013. A 2012 survey of several hundred medical students found 94 percent use the site for health information.
But despite its popularity, the reliability of Wikipedia’s medical content has often been questioned.”
Current situation
“A chronological overview of important Dutch open access and open science successes….”
VACANCY DOAJ Ambassadors | News Service
“The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) indexes more than 11 000 open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science and humanities. It is a white list of open access journals and aims to be the starting point for information searches for quality, peer reviewed open access material. Publishers must apply for their journal(s) to be indexed in DOAJ and each application is reviewed manually by the editorial team. We receive approximately 80 new applications every week. DOAJ has been awarded a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) to improve open access publishing practices in the Global South. We are now seeking 8-10 full time Ambassadors (10 month contract) who are residents in the following regions and are native speakers of the indicated languages and fluent in English …”
Books and articles across borders and languages (1990-2015) [PDF] | Marie Lebert
“After Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web and gave his invention to the world, books and articles could be accessed more easily. New media, new bookstores and new libraries helped cross national borders. Authors and journalists started working together at a distance. Internet users who didn’t have English as a mother tongue reached 5 percent in summer 1994, 20 percent in summer 1998, 50 percent in summer 2000, and 75 percent in summer 2015. Some of them could read English, others just got the gist of what they read, and a number of them couldn’t read English at all. The web saw the rise of linguistic democracy and the development of “language nations”, both large and small. Many dedicated people helped promoting their own language and culture, or the language and culture of others, while using English as a lingua franca. In a short time, they made the web truly multilingual, with bilingual or trilingual websites, language-related resources, reference dictionaries, multilingual encyclopedias and translation software. These people were linguists, authors, librarians, teachers, professors, researchers, computer programmers, marketing consultants, and so on. This book is based on many interviews conducted for several years in Europe, in the Americas, in Africa and in Asia….”