Openresearch:About

This semantic wiki at Openresearch aims at making the world of science more visible and accessible. Information about scientific events, research projects, publishers, journals etc. is scattered around on the Web. For researchers (especially young ones without decades of experience) it is often difficult to find the relevant venues, people or tools. Also research is increasingly dynamic and multi-disciplinary, so the boundaries between communities blur and new research directions emerge. With this semantic Wiki, we aim to make information about scientific events, research groups, tools, journals etc. more accessible. Openresearch is not restricted to any field of science.

What is Openresearch

The concept of Open Access gained recently quite some attention as a means to make science more accessible, flexible and efficient. But gaining access to scientific results is just one aspect for making research more efficient. Scientists also need to know who is working on what, which tools are available, what conferences are worth visiting and presenting, where to get funding ... A large part of their time researchers are busy trying to get these kinds of information for their work. Openresearch provides a plattform for researchers to collect, organize, share and disseminate this kind of information in a structured way.

You can think of Openresearch being yellow pages, event calendar, news wire, project directory of science all together. Everybody can easily participate and all information is freely available (also for download and republication).

What Openresearch is not?

• an encyclopedia (please only add research related content),
• a repository for bibliographic information (have a look at http://Bibsonomy.org),
• an open-access publisher (check out http://online-journals.org),
• an organizer of events.

How to get involved?

• help us organizing the world of science - add your favorite events, tools, organizations, journals, colleagues
• create a link to OpenResearch.org from your homepage
• stay connected by subscribing to one of our mailinglists:
  • OpenResearch announcements
  • OpenResearch discussion
  • OpenResearch editors
• become an editor or associated editor of the field you work in
• tell your friends and colleagues about Openresearch
• help us further developing Openresearch by creating new search interfaces

How is a Semantic Wiki different?

Semantic Wikis allow to structure information as would be possible with a database. Other than databases, however , Semantic Wikis are more flexible and easier to use. Openresearch is based on the Semantic MediaWiki. Some of the templates and properties used here are adapted from http://SemanticWeb.org, which was created by Markus Krötsch and other members of the Semantic Web community.

Who is behind Openresearch?

OpenResearch.org was created by members of the AKSW and Business Information Systems departments at Universität Leipzig. As the community is growing and we also started other Open Research related projects (such as Cofundos.org and the Participatory Research initiative) we are currently in the process of establishing a separate organisation - the Open Research Association.

Contact

Sören Auer

c/o AG AKSW / Business Information Systems dep.

Institut für Informatik

Universität Leipzig

Postfach 100920

04009 Leipzig

European Union / Germany

Phone: +49 (341) 97–32320

Fax: +49 (341) 97–32329

Email: info@OpenResearch.org

Web: http://OpenResearch.org