Open Access and Publishing on Line
It is Open Access Week and here at Pontydysgu we are committed to doing our bit to support the cause.
We have a large archive of papers and books to which one or another of us has contributed at some time or other. None of it is going to be a best seller but some of the papers and books may be of interest to researchers, teachers, trainers or developers. And form time to time, I receive an email from people asking about where they can get a copy of one paper or another.
We did have a go at it a year and a half or so ago and Dirk spent ages trying to get the system working using bibtext. The problem is the system was just too clunky. Indeed looking at our stub page of journal articles I see the server is feeding up the following error message – Failed to write file/home/pontydysgu.org/htdocs/wp-content/plugins/bib2html/data/pontydysgu.cached.bib – check directory permission according to your Web server privileges – whatever that means.
So we need a better system. We did think about using the University of Bremen;s open access docuemnt service. But once more, on test this also has its drawbacks. This afternoon I tried creating an ebook on the Lulu site. And it is not bad. However all it basically does is makes available a PDF file, albeit with quite a neat presentation.
So if any of you are interested you can download “Creating Learning Spaces: Training and Professional Development for Trainers” from the Pontydysgu page on Lulu (for free of course).
I reckon this is not a bad format for books. And for papers we are thinking of using Scribd which seems to work pretty well with Wordpress. But i would be interested in your views. What is the best way for us to publish an archive of perhaps 200 papers, books and book chapters? And what is the best format? Should we try to produce ebooks for devices like the ipod touch? And, if so, what is the best way to do it> Your help will be much appreciated.
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