John Kaye of the British Library recently shared his views on what open data and academia have to learn from one another. He writes, “Professor Nigel Shadbolt recently visited the Library to talk to staff about the benefits of releasing public data into the wild. He didn’t need to convince me, being a public sector researcher prior to joining the library I fought many licensing and cost battles to get my hands on the data needed for my research projects. This blog isn’t about making the case for opening up public data as this has been made many times and yielded numerous important benefits. Having worked in creating, using and disseminating both public and academic data I think that there are tools and methodologies that both areas can learn from each other.” Read more

Semantic technology firm Publishing Technology has been chosen to design GSE Research’s academic publishing platform. The article states, “The new online platform for research into governance, sustainability, and the environment will be built using Publishing Technology’s semantic web-based publishing software, pub2web. The new platform will be among the first of its kind offering the option of an open peer-review model alongside the traditional peer-review system. This new publishing model aims to speed up the submission process and encourage heightened engagement and collaboration among users.” Read more

A recent article discusses the semantic web’s potential to generate “scholarly serendipity.” The author writes, “The more I learn about the potential of Linked
Data, the more I am convinced that Linked Data’s biggest payoff for scholarship will be that it will rationalize and democratize a certain kind of scholarly serendipity. The scholarly value of serendipity usually comes up in discussions of browsing, and in calls for maintaining large, open, physical collections of library materials. Scholarly serendipity generally involves the unexpected discovery of some connection among people, places, things, or concepts that others have not yet discovered.” Read more

The NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute has added Computational and Digital Journalism to their list of majors. According to the website, “This new sequence of courses responds to trends in the news industry and journalism profession: the shifting from print and broadcasting to a digital base. There is huge demand for people who have the traditional skills and aptitude of a journalist and enough technical knowledge to re-design a website, create an interactive data feature that can run online, or build a mobile application for news company. Almost all the employers who have traditionally taken our graduates are experiencing a severe shortage of technical talent.” Read more