Research News
WikiVet secures additional government funding for Open Publishing
12 April 2011
The WikiVet consortium which includes the RVC has just secured £ 93,000 in funding from the Joint Information Services Committee (JISC) to support the creation of further resources on the WikiVet site. The Opening Veterinary Access to Literature (OVAL) project involves the repackaging of currently restricted-view veterinary educational resources into an open format, which will then be made freely accessible to an international audience of veterinary online learners. The project represents a novel consortium between two veterinary schools (RVC and Nottingham) and two publishing houses (CABI and Manson Publishing).
Veterinary students and graduates have become increasingly confident in using web based resources to supplement or replace traditional approaches to learning. Whilst the convenience of e-learning has obvious attraction, there are also concerns with the academic quality of online information and how to search for it amongst the numerous other less reliable sources. The OVAL project will help to address these issues by adapting quality peer reviewed articles and datasheets provided by our commercial partners and integrating these in to the widely used WikiVet veterinary educational portal.
Currently, there is an extensive range of veterinary literature produced by private sector publishers which has a limited readership due to the prohibitive costs. However, with the significant market changes associated with e-publishing, there is now a good business case for making some of these resources free to view. The OVAL project intends to use this opportunity to develop an innovative model for repurposing online journals and text books as Open Educational Resources (OER).
Barbora Stanikova, OVAL Project Officer stated “We are really excited by the opportunities that this additional funding provides for the WikiVet site. Working with commercial publishers gives us access to a range of additional resources to enhance the existing materials on the site. Our users have already started to comment on the rich learning experience of using flash cards linked to additional resources already on WikiVet”
The OVAL project will run for a seven month period with new resources constantly being added to the WikiVet site. To access these simply log in at http://en.wikivet.net/OVAL.
Further information : contact Barbora Stanikova (bstanikova@rvc.ac.uk)
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