Open Access for On-Line Education

Last week I commenced the course Assessment, Evaluation and Learning EDU5713, at University of Southern Queensland, via e-learning. One technique I have found useful to supplement the materials provided for the course, is to first look up terms in the Wikipedia and the search for materials in Google Scholar. Wikipedia generally provides a brief, easy to understand overview of the topic and Google Scholar provides authoritative papers (it is not a good idea to cite Wikipedia in your assignment).

As an example the Wikipedia entry for Assessment_for_Learning is very readable and the Google Scholar Entries are useful.

One way Google Scholar could be improved would be with an "Article Available" option. It is frustrating to have numerous articles listed, but then find most are behind pay-walls, so that it is not possible to read more than the abstract, without paying a fee or signing up to a service. I Suggest adding an extra option "Article Available" to allow only those articles where the text is available on-line without the need for payment or signing in.

It would also be useful to have the same open access options (for looking for articles with Creative Commons and similar licenses), as in the non-scholar advanced search, would also be useful.

While institutions, such as USQ, provide access to on-line papers via their library, it is much easier for the staff and the students, if freely available articles are selected for readings. This way the student does not need to login to the university library system to get to the article.

ps: Surprisingly on the topic of e-learning, many of the papers found are from Australian authors. This may be because the Google search engine, seeing I am in Australia is giving me local results, or that doing an Australian course I am searching on topics of particular interest to Australians. But it may be just that Australia is a leader in e-learning.

ACS Digital Library Indexed

I wrote 22 November 2006:

... The first electronic edition of AJIS is now on-line ...

This morning I registered the AJIS with three indexing services. These all communicate via XML formatted data interfaces:

• OAI: The Public Knowledge Project's Open Archives Harvester. This is an Open Archives Initiative (OAI)-compliant archive of publications metadata. When indexed it should be possible to search for articles in AJIS from OAI systems around the world. I am not sure how long it will take for the metadata to be indexed.
• Google Scholar Gateway Plugin: This is an extra feature for the OJS system which provides an interface to allow Google to collect information about the journal papers. Google Scholar is a speclai part of Google's search system for academic publising.
• DOIs: CrossRef is a service which provides a lookup (resolver) for the Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) of each paper. DOIs are short, easy to reference identifiers for each paper.

For example the DOI for Roger Clarke's paper is:

10.3127/ajis.v14i1.12

That is:

10.3127 ACS (Publisher)
ajis AJIS (Journal)
.v14i1 Volume 14 Number 1
.12 Paper number 12

When entered in the CrossRef resolver this DOI produces the URL of the paper: <http://dl.acs.org.au/index.php/ajis/article/view/12>.

For the DOIs OJS generates an XML file listing all the papers. Unlike the OAI and Google Scholar interfaces which are "live" and once set up just work; for each issue of each journal a batch file of DOI metadata has to be manually loaded to the CrossRef system. While this is not difficult, hopefully OJS will provide an automated interface in the future.

Here is what the entry for Roger Clarke's paper looks like:

<journal_article publication_type="full_text">
<titles>
<title>Key Aspects of the History of the Information Systems Discipline in Australia</title>
</titles>
<contributors>
<person_name contributor_role="author" sequence="first">
<given_name>Roger</given_name>
<surname>Clarke</surname>
</person_name>
</contributors>
<publication_date media_type="online">
<month>12</month>
<day>04</day>
<year>2006</year>
</publication_date>
<publisher_item><item_number>12</item_number></publisher_item>
<doi_data>
<doi>10.3127/ajis.v14i1.12</doi>
<resource><a href="http://dl.acs.org.au/index.php/ajis/article/view/12" eudora="autourl">http://dl.acs.org.au/index.php/ajis/article/view/12</a></resource>
</doi_data>
</journal_article>

If that all sounds complicated, it is. But apart from uploading one DOI file each time there is a new edition of the journal, everything should be automatic.

ps: For the philosophy behind all this, see my ANU talk.