Jesse Dylan’s brief video about the Science Commons raises for me a question about other disciplines. What would a Theological Commons look like?  Dylan’s video provides an easy rationale for the Science Commons. What would it be for theology and religion?

We’ve been proposing here at the Theology Library that an important part of our work is to create focused subject area portals that collect a corpus of texts or, perhaps better, data, that can sustain and draw scholarly collaboration and dialogue. Would we imagine such a portal as a “commons?”

embedded by Embedded Video

Download Video

Baraniuk’s vision of an open source system for sharing digital texts is consistent with our vision for the History of Missiology web site though admittedly a few steps further down the road. We are trying to provide a body of texts that can support teaching, research, investigation, and conversation about the the beginnings of Christianity in the non western world, the founding of indigenous churches, and early theories of comparative religion. Mission thinkers produced some of the first ethnographic studies of people in primal societies, and histories of encounters between westerners and people from Asia, Africa, and the America. In a course setting, the site provides for the students and professor to engage in conversation through blogs, discussion forums, and chat. Baraniuk has taken the vision a step further to encourage a real mashup of the texts in a way that I find to be a really fascinating possibility.

Naturally, his vision has enormous implication for scholarly publishing…

Engineering professor Richard Baraniuk talks about his vision for Connexions, an open-source system that lets teachers share digital texts and course materials, modify them and give them to their students — all free, thanks to Creative Commons licensing.

Read the rest of this entry »

 Patricia Cohen reports in the New York Times that Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty will consider an alternate to traditional scholarly publishing that could have wide implications for the open access movement.

Under the proposal Harvard would deposit finished papers in an open-access repository run by the library that would instantly make them available on the Internet. Authors would still retain their copyright and could publish anywhere they pleased — including at a high-priced journal, if the journal would have them.