[open-bibliography] Fwd: News release: Referencing made easy

Mon May 17 13:25:27 UTC 2010

This looks very interesting. I wonder whether/how the project
currently supports sharing reference/citation data?

David: do you know whether there are any plans to encourage
institutions/researchers to open up reference data? Or anything about
the IPR management model? Seems like potentially a big opportunity to
share citation data more effectively...

All the best,

Jonathan

---------- Forwarded message ----------

News release
17 May 2010

Referencing made easy

A new piece of software to help students and universities manage
academic references more easily has been developed by the Open
University and its partners.

Funded by JISC, and made in collaboration with RefWorks, the web-based
research management, writing and collaboration tool, the OU has
developed MyReferences to simplify referencing.

Lawrie Phipps, programme manager at JISC, said: “Writing up references
can be a really time-consuming activity for the student and researcher
– but it’s essential to avoid plagiarism, develop robust scholarship
and lead the reader to other relevant work.  This resource is one
aspect of a huge investment from JISC which aims to spark innovative
solutions to issues like referencing that affect people working up and
down the country, in order to inspire and help other UK colleges and
universities.”

MyReferences integrates tools from the widely-used RefWorks reference
management software into the Moodle virtual learning environment which
is used in academic institutions across the UK to support online
learning.

Nicky Whitsed, director of library services at the OU, said: “For
students, this means helping them to adopt good practice in organising
and managing references and using citations appropriately in their
work. And for universities this new and easy reference management
system will help to tackle plagiarism by making referencing easier;
encourage information literacy; and help libraries to improve
reference management for courses”.

The MyReferences software is open source, making it free for any
institution to download, tailor to their own needs and integrate into
their own learning environments.

The software is part of the 'technology enhanced learning supporting
students to achieve academic rigour' (TELSTAR) project.  Owen
Stephens, project manager, said: “These new tools are invaluable to
the 21st century educational institution and student. There is an ever
increasing wealth of resources available and hence a real need for
students, course and programme teams to be able to create, manipulate,
organise and store a range of citations and bibliographic references
for easy use."

There are already a number of general referencing tools available to
students, but MyReferences takes the usability of these tools a step
further by integrating them into online courses so the materials
students commonly need to reference are already available in the
format they need. Students simply select the sources they need to
reference, the referencing style their institution requires and then
copy and paste the result into their assignment.

Owen continued: “From now until July we’ll be working with other
institutions to implement the software, as well as continuing to pilot
it with staff and students at the OU. The response we’ve had so far
from students and staff alike has been overwhelmingly positive and
we’re looking forward to working with more and more organisations in
the UK and across the world to spread the benefits of this new
referencing tool.”

"RefWorks is proud to be a part of the MyReferences project – it not
only provides users with an effective and easy-to-use research
management tool, but it takes another step towards educating them
about information literacy,” said Colleen Stempien, executive director
of operations, RefWorks-COS.  “Any institution that currently
subscribes to RefWorks may easily adapt the added Moodle integration
functionality using the RefWorks API.”

See a visual demonstration of MyReferences at
<http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/telstar/telstar-quick-demonstration/>

Find out more about events planned to share information about TELSTAR
and developments in the field of reference management at
<http://www.open.ac.uk/telstar/event>

-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://blog.okfn.org

http://twitter.com/jwyg
http://identi.ca/jwyg