The PressForward Initiative: Creating New Modes and New Platforms for Scholarship Beyond Traditional Forms

The PressForward Initiative: Creating New Modes and New Platforms for Scholarship Beyond Traditional Forms

The PressForward Initiative: Creating New Modes and New Platforms for Scholarship Beyond Traditional Forms

Grant document proposes the PressForward Initiative (PFI) to explore the best means for aggregating, curating, and crediting scholarship that is currently decentralized across the web or does not fit into traditional genres such as the journal article or the monograph. PFI will pioneer new methods for capturing and highlighting a vast expanse of presently orphaned or underappreciated scholarship in ways that are useful to scholarly communities and which will, as a byproduct, promote open access by making web publications more valuable. Through a structured study of existing methods and a set of prototype, new-style, "now-journals," robust data will be collected that will provide the project, organizations, and funders knowledge about optimal open-web scholarly curation. At the end of the project, CHNM will release an open-source platform for scholarly communities and organizations to create their own trusted, high-value streams of relevant content. All data and code produced in this project will be freely available.

06/01/2011

12/01/2014

Tom Scheinfeldt

Dan Cohen

Joan Fragaszy

Sean Takats

Stephanie Westcott

Lisa Rhody

Lindsay Bestebreurtje

Sasha Boni

Amanda Morton

Jeri Wieringa

Ben Schneider

Adam Aston

Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Peter Jerram

Shana Kimball

David Kirsch

Alexis Madrigal

Steve Wheatley

Aram Zucker-Scharff

Boone B. Gorges

1. PFI will produce considerable research on effective methods for aggregation and curation of online scholarship, including 'gray literature' such as white papers and reports, self-published and institutionally hosted works, and social media such as blogs. This research will be published in two phases: the first an overall taxonomy of new publication types and the second a thorough analysis of strategies and effectiveness.

2. PFI will encourage the proliferation of open access scholarship by producing prototype outlets that aggregate attention and deal with the question of reputation.

3. PFI will produce a new platform that will make it simple for any organization or community of scholars to create these new-style 'journals,' producing variants of the prototypes planned herein, including export tools to port the best content at regular intervals (e.g, quarterly, yearly) into broadly publishable formats such as ePub.

4. PFI will provide guidance to institutions, scholarly societies, and academic publishers who are currently unable to experiment with as much latitude as necessary to find new models for the future.

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation