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Publishing Student Research Online

I’ve been fascinated by the idea of publishing student research for several years now.  I’ve always felt that if we could implement one or more institution wide e-publishing platforms that it would help me collect university archival materials. I will admit that really want some sort of institutional repository so that I can not only see what kinds of materials are being generated across campus but publish archival content as well. What ever function Georgia College online e-publishing platform would have, I think its proper place would be in the LITC. I don’t believe that this platform should be completely controlled by the LITC, but I see us functioning as, curators, describers and maintainers. Our main goals would be to provide access, make access easier, and standards enforcers.

To begin thinking about e-publishing in general, I started to explores some of the products avaliable for e-publishing. Below is a somewhat annotated list of online platform for “publishing” student and faculty work.

Open Source and Free

D-Space

D-Space is currently being used by several USG institutions to publish content online. D-Space is technically an online repository system, and does not have built in features such as peer review. D-Space would make dissemination easy because of metadata standards, etc. D-Space does not display multimedia projects in a “pretty” fashion.

Pro
USG Schools Using this Platform
Galileo Knowledge Repository
University Wide Uses

Con
No internal peer review system
Requires server space or off site hosting

Open Journal System

The Open Journal System was a federal funded project put out by the Public Knowledge Project. This program has full peer review built into it. There are many journals being published online through this system.

Pro
Full peer review
Online Submission
Commenting

Con
Requires server space to host
Not a lot of use in State(GA tech moving away from platform)

gcsu.edu and podcasting server

There is the possibility that an online publications could be distributed through systems that we currently have on campus. These would not be as sophisticated as others, but technological cost would be minimal.

Pro
Technology Cost would be inexpensive
little to no website setup time

Con
would not make publications easy to search
lack of sophistication

Proprietary

BE Press

Be Press, or Brekecly Electronic Press, is not just one tool, but many that can be used to facilitate student research and publication.

Pro

Easy Setup
Support

Con
Cost?

 ISSU (Pro)

ISSU is a proprietary online publishing platform. This platform would be all about publishing content, but would not have any features, such as peer review or managing submissions. Designed for popular content and magazines.

Pro
There is a free version
Nice interface and design

Con
Not designed for academic publishing
Would publications be  discoverable