Documents and Knowledge Sharing System

[JAN]

Hello,
I am student at Katholieke Hogeschool Kempen,Belgium. I am the participant of the project which is called DoKS. You can find more information about this project on the following web address :
http://www.doks.be (EN button is for the english version)
This site makes electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) of several Flemish Institutes for Higher Education available. We collect metadata (author, title, summary, publication year, etc...) of participating institutes and make them retrievable.
And our task is to develop this page and make it better. What is the main differences between our project and yours? Do you have any suggestions for our project?

[ramon]

Dear Jan,

If you're using OAI-PMH as the Metadata Transfer and Harvesting Protocol, if you use oai-dc, etd-ms, or a proprietary format, and more importantly if you allow public access to that knowledge, then your project is no different than ours at Ibict (Brazil) or the PKP ETD project.

However, if you're implementing a tool for students to create their documents automatically, which will be treated by some software that will publish these documents automatically to your ETD Digital Library, then you're doing something that we're also interested and begining to work on too.

Good luck.

[JAN]

Dear Ramon,
Thank you for your answer. I will report your answer to my teachers. I checked your web page and I compared your project and ours then I wrote a report about it. You can see this report below and if you read and correct it I will be very glad.
The differences between the DoKS and the PKP (Public Knowledge Project):
Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is established by the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. It has online systems such as Electronic Theses and Dissertations, Open Journal Systems, Open Archives Harvester, Open Conference Systems and Research Support Tool. The main differences between the DoKS and the PKP are the amount of money they charge, the forum and online systems.
The first difference is; the PKP systems are designed to be downloaded free of charge, but the DoKS System won't provide this system free of charge. The second difference is; the PKP system has got a ‘Support Forum’ which contains 5 different forums, but the DoKS system hasn‘t got any forums. These five forums of the PKP are ‘General’, ‘Open Journal System’, ‘Open Conference Systems’, ‘OAI Harvester’ and ‘Research Support Tool’. These forums are designed for the members. Members can use this forum as a chatting room and they can also contact the administrators and moderators of this forum. The third difference between the PKP and the DoKS is related to their online services. The DoKS system has an online service for only Electronic Theses and Dissertations. The PKS system has four more online systems, which are ‘Open Journal Systems’, ‘Open Archives Harvester’, ‘Open Conference Systems’ and ’Research Support Tool’. Public Knowledge Project’s web page is http://pkp.ubc.ca/index.html .

[ramon]

Dear JAN,

I'm only an OJS user. My institution (ibict) was responsible for the translation of OJS to portuguese, and maintaining a direct contact with the PKP Team to develop what we consider important for our scientific community.
John Willinsky would be the right person to answer your question more appropriately, but I could give you some pointers.

The PKP is a project geared towards providing public access to knowledge that would otherwise be difficult to find. To fulfill their objective they developed a set of tools, as well as use other free Open Source solutions, which are or will be integrated by the OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting).

Why use OAI? Because science is supposed to be free... Knowledge should be shared. Scientific research has been previously funded, there should be no need for people to pay over and over to access funded research. John would say these thing in a more polished and a lot more convincing way.

Also, there is a need for the common people (those who do not know about the subject in question) to have access to a broader context to what their reading, or else, they would have no means to tell if what they are reading is useful, or eve correct.

At our institution we have also embraced OAI and Open Source to reduce the cost of research and provide greater public access to knowledge.