[Ica-osgeo-labs] Open Access Book on Open Geospatial

[Charles Schweik]

Suchith,

On Fri, Nov 22, 2013 at 11:50 PM, Suchith Anand <
Suchith.Anand at nottingham.ac.uk> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> Earlier this week i  participated in the  10th Anniversary of the Berlin
> Open Access Declaration http://openaccess.mpg.de/286432/Berlin-Declaration



> I have been in discussion with colleagues at Nottingham on starting work
> on Open Access Book on Open Geospatial covering both applications and
> theory (with examples using OSGeo stack and open data). Amir is working on
> the initial content draft which i will share with anyone interested and
> invite all interested to contribute.
>
> We would also like to get advice, feedbacks,ideas on Open Access Book
> publication. We have four main requirements
>
> So if you have ideas on this, please let me know.
>

A couple ideas/reactions:

1) For those who might be interested in the ideas around Open Access, look
at Peter Suber's recent (open access) book on the topic [1]. I find the
ideas of "gold" and "green open access" quite interesting. Ultimately, I
think we want to build the content in our ica-osgeolab repository as one of
these.

2) Re an Open Access book on Open Geospatial, there already is one
introductory volume (different, I think than what you are suggesting,
Suchith) by our colleague Victor Olaya [2]. The challenge for me is that I
cannot read it. It would be wonderful if someone in our network who reads
and writes both Spanish and English could contact Victor and consider doing
a translation if he would be open to that (I think he would be). That
translation would be, I think, a huge step forward.

3) I'd be interested in seeing the structure of the edited volume you are
considering and would be happy to be involved somehow if you think I can
help.

4) I envision a complementary volume or set of "lab manual" volumes that
embrace the move toward the *flipped* classroom model where there are
exercises teaching students various open source GIS functions and then pose
"analytic puzzlers" that they are to do as exercises on their own. My
colleague at UMass, Bethany Bradley and I have a full volume of this kind
of thing using proprietary GIS for one of the courses we teach and that we
offer over the self-publishing site LuLu.com so our students can order
hardcopies [3]. They work really well. One possibility to jump-start would
be for someone in our network translate these same exercises so they use
OSGeo-related open source project solutions rather than a proprietary
solution, and then make these available in our repository (making sure
Bethany gets attribution, and with her permission to do so). If anyone is
interested in this idea and would be interested in a project where they
help to make these translations, let me know.

Cheers,

Charlie

[1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/open-access
[2] http://volaya.es/cursosig.htm
[3] http://tinyurl.com/og4rb8e




-- 
Charlie Schweik

Associate Professor, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Department of Environmental Conservation - http://eco.umass.edu
Center for Public Policy and Administration - http://masspolicy.org
Associate Director, National Center for Digital Government - http://ncdg.org
Author, Internet Success: A Study of Open Source Software (MIT Press, 2012)
- see http://tinyurl.com/d3e4545
Outsmart Invasive Species project: http://masswoods.net/outsmart
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