I have been mulling over the idea, that the time might be right to revive the old Innovation & Research group within CIAT, with perhaps a little tweak in its remit.
A lot of members , at least ones that I have talked to, are looking for ways to publish technical papers, and open debates on technical issues. currently the only way to successfully do this is via submitting papers for pier review and watch it disappear behind a closed academic, or fire pay wall, fine for academic writing, but almost useless for some one who might want a little more exposure and publicity. I have several out there, that you need to pay for to read, and I get nothing.
I have nothing against this if you're a true academic, who has little or no problem accessing papers and is only interested in an academic career, but for us on the outside even the likes of me, who has a foot in the academic world but earns most of his monthly income from public sources, who wants free access to published material, simply because is a great way to prove my expertise.
My thoughts are that we would build a small system to allow papers to be simply uploaded, and reviewed by CIAT Chartered members and then pushed onto an open free resource, I have played about with such a system on wordpress, and it works very well, Google Scholar would be free to scan and list papers, and authors would get full recognition for their work. Academic can still cite and use as always, but the tech public outside of academia, will not be bared from the main article.
You might say tha this is the reason for AT magazine, I would argue not, for one it's not peer reviewed, and second it's not easy to search online for an article or paper, this new system takes it to the next level and beyond.
As always there are problems, getting members to donate time to read and comment on papers, archive and protection of work. but there does not seem to be any major obstacle, other than active participation and writing interesting papers.
As a natural follow on, I have an idea to allow presentation of work as a bi annual conference, somewhere in Europe to start, than see where it can be hosted.
Unlike ICAT whose papers seem to be for specific topic and are listed in a single book, I want individual papers on any topic 24 hours a day 365 days a year.
Language is alway a problem, but Google is so good at it, that I don't see a problem in dual language submissions.
I have alway wondered why photography is never looked at as an academic source, there is so much to see and read from a single photo, I want to explore this further either within this academic site, or as part of a separate site, devoted to technical photography. Observation is lacking in so many people, so the thought that a single shot of a construction with a well written text content could convey so much in comparison to a long technical article, I find intriguing. I have been playing with this with my Flickr account, lots of tags and a well written notes, with a good descriptive title.
CPD is a problem, we just don't have the time to attend a lecture, so as part of this debate, I want to take a look at lectures on video, I have done several of these with some minor success on just a few, but it prove a point. There is a way to go, I want to add slides and lecture notes with added reading and research comments, perhaps site addresses, and cad files links
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