PeerLibrary

PeerLibrary’s groups and collections functionality is especially suited towards educators running classes that involve reading and discussing various academic publications. This week we would like to highlight one such collection, created for a graduate level computer science class taught by Professor John Kubiatowicz at UC Berkeley. The course, Advanced Topics in Computer Systems, requires weekly readings which are handily stored on the PeerLibrary platform for students to read, discuss, and collaborate outside of the typical classroom setting. Articles within the collection come from a variety of sources, such as the publicly available “Key Range Locking Strategies” and the closed access “ARIES: A Transaction Recovery Method”. Even closed access articles, which hide the article from unauthorized users, allow users to view the comments and annotations!

Photo: Aloysius Wilfred Raj Arokiaraj

We are proud to announce an updated screencast which demos the increased functionality and updated user interface of the PeerLibrary website. This screencast debuted at the Mozilla Festival in October as part of our science fair presentation. The video showcases an article by Paul Dourish and Scott D. Mainwaring entitled “Ubicomp’s Colonial Impulse” as well as the easy commenting and discussion features which PeerLibrary emphasizes. One of the MozFest conference attendees actually recognized the article which drew him towards our booth and into a conversation with our team. Check out the new screencast and let us know what you think!

Photo: Antero Garcia

Please follow and support us on our recently-opened Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/PeerLibrary. 

Semifinalists for the Knight News Challenge will be chosen tomorrow and the refinement period will begin. This is your last chance to show your support for our submission before the next stage of the competition. The Knight Foundation is asking “How might we leverage libraries as a platform to build more knowledgeable communities?” We believe that PeerLibrary closely parallels the theme of the challenge and provides an answer to the foundation’s question. By facilitating a community of independent learners and promoting collaborative reading and discussion of academic resources, PeerLibrary is modernizing the concept of a library in order to educate and enrich the global community. Please help us improve our proposal, give us feedback, and wish PeerLibrary good luck in the next stage of the Knight News Challenge.

Beyond establishing an online database of publicly accessible academic articles, PeerLibrary has committed itself to providing an open space where people are encouraged to collaborate and communicate with one another. This week we want to highlight a fascinating article in our database, titled “Towards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development”, by Professor Leslie Chan, et. al. at the University of Toronto. Professor Chan’s team focuses on the importance of research and the necessity for anyone, not just academic scholars, to be able to engage and conduct research as well as share and critique one another’s ideas. He claims that only open collaboration will effectively promote human development and allow the merging of different identities. With the words of Professor Chan in mind, PeerLibrary hopes to aid the development of free collaboration under the guiding principle of the universal right to education.

Weekly PeerLibrary meeting finalizing our Knight News Challenge submission.

PeerLibrary 0.3 is here featuring improved importing, privacy settings everywhere, feedback on publications processing, lists of all entities to navigate, improved invitations, optimized loading time, and many many more fixes and improvements around.

PeerLibrary is an open source project, which means that we rely heavily on the participation and contributions of the community around our project. There are two main segments of a community: developers who contribute to source code, and users who contribute, collaborate, and engage with content. Community managers would work with both segments of the community. Community managers will engage with new contributors and users, identify issues for contributors, and streamline the process for joining the project. Community managers will also be responsible for external communications, such as: reaching out to new users, keeping the Open Access / Open Knowledge community abreast of new developments in the project and presenting the project to the public. Community managers will learn about developer relations, how open source projects are structured and run, and gain experience in communications and community management. Desired experience: Community managers should have strong written English and interest in issues related to Open Access and Open Knowledge, more broadly. Bring enthusiasm; we will provide the rest.

PeerLibrary is calling for collaboration on open dataset of all academic publications.

In this way you can form groups with colleagues who are not yet on PeerLibrary and share private publications and annotations with them.

Hi, everybody! We've released version 0.2 of PeerLibrary. Whereas version 0.1 was really a beta version that displayed our vision for what PeerLibrary could become, version 0.2 is fully functional. Our new version has features like permissions, groups, and collections that facilitate regular usage. Please come and test it out, import publications you like, and give us feedback! :-)

We made a new video talking about the emerging community of PeerLibrary, as well as the project's origins in the open access movement.

Presentation of PeerLibrary at iAnnotate 2014 conference in San Francisco. Including the demo of current version in development, 0.2.