[Oer-community] Global Open Access Map - - resource for location coordinates

Wed Nov 21 01:10:37 MST 2012

Dear OER Colleagues,

My organization/division maintains an international standard called the,
"United Nations Code for Trade and Transport Locations (UN/LOCODE) which is
used by governments, postal services, shippers and transport companies
around the world. It includes over 60,000 codes for locations and the
definitions for the codes include the coordinates of the location (i.e. its
latitude and longitude). We verify these coordinates before the codes are
published (and users write to us if they find any mistakes), so the
coordinates for the codes have a pretty high degree of accuracy. The great
majority of the major cities, ports and airports in the world are included
(and if it is not there you can use our online facility to submit an
application for a location to be added).

The website where you can find the codes (and their coordinates) organised
by country and alphabetically within the country is:
http://www.unece.org/cefact/locode/service/location.html  - so no need for
most of you to figure out how to get your GPS to give you the coordinates
of where you are - you can just go to the web.

This work is done under the aegis of the intergovernmental body called the,
"United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business
(UN/CEFACT)" ( website: http://www.unece.org/cefact.html ).

Best regards,

Virginia Cram-Martos

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Virginia Cram-Martos
Director
Trade and Sustainable Land Management Division
United Nations Economic Commission for Europe
Palais des Nations, Rm 452
1211 Geneva 10

From:	Alma Swan <a.swan at talk21.com>
To:	oer-community <oer-community at athabascau.ca>
Date:	21/11/2012 07:39
Subject:	Re: [Oer-community] Global Open Access Map - lessons for OER?
Sent by:	oer-community-bounces at athabascau.ca

Dear colleagues,

Thank you, Susan, for introducing Leslie and myself. We are happy to tell
you a bit about our Open Access Map and how we conceived the project. The
map is at www.openaccessmap.org

We wanted to create a visual representation of how Open Access is
progressing globally. A geographical map seemed the most appropriate way to
represent OA (though we will be adding a timeline when we get a bit more
funding). Our aim was to crowdsource the venture, so individuals can submit
the details of their own project, journal, repository, service, etc. We
have an editorial step, where Leslie or myself approves the submission:
often these need a bit of correction, checking or chasing up, so it is not
labour-free. I’m just saying that in case you envisage doing something
similar. The most common thing that needs completing is the georeference of
the submission: despite the submission page having boxes for latitude and
longitude, and a link to a service that provides these things for each
city/town in the world, many submitters leave this step out – and this
service they want to be represented on is a map! Ah well...

As well as the public submissions, we draw data (daily) from a number of
registries, such as the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR), the
Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR), ROARMAP ( list of OA
policies) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

The data in the Map can be re-used by anyone to do research or build new
services. We think we’ve achieved a fairly complete representation of the
infrastructural elements that support progress on OA. We know, though, that
projects are not well-represented on the Map. This means that the record is
missing many of the temporary or transient initiatives that have been
important in forging progress.  This is a shame in the sense that the Map
is not able to provide a really complete picture of effort towards OA, but
that is an aspiration that is rather unrealistic anyway.

Hope this is helpful in providing a snapshot of our little venture.

Alma

------------------------------------
Alma Swan, BSc, PhD, MBA
Director of European Advocacy Programmes, SPARC: www.arl.org/sparc
Director, Key Perspectives Ltd: www.keyperspectives.co.uk
Convenor, Enabling Open Scholarship: www.openscholarship.org
+44 (0)1392 879702
Skype: almaswan
http://bit.ly/aQXNEy

On 21/11/2012 02:23, "Susan D'Antoni" <susandantoni at gmail.com> wrote:

      Dear Colleagues,

      One of the issues we need to consider is whether an OER map could be
      developed collaboratively and what might be an appropriate
      organization. Seth has just noted that building a comprehensive list
      of OER  initiatives might be rather ambitious.

      During the time I spent with the super people at the UK Open
      University, we reviewedt a range of examples of maps and then Teresa
      Connolly used the Open CourseWare Consortium data to create the
      sample OER map for this discussion.  One of the maps we looked at was
      the Global Open Access Map. There is a similarity to some of the
      things we have discussed http://www.openaccessmap.org/about/ .  There
      might be some lessons for us.

      The creators of the map, Alma Swan and Leslie Chan, have agreed to
      share their experience with us and give us some information about how
      they have organized the project.

      Alma Swan is a consultant working in the field of scholarly
      communication. She is a director of Key Perspectives Ltd <
      http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/>  and Director of European Advocacy
      Programmes for SPARC<http://www.arl.org/sparc>  and Convenor for
      Enabling Open Scholarship<http://www.openscholarship.org/> , the
      organisation of universities promoting the principles of open
      scholarship in the academic community.

      Leslie Chan is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences
      at the University of Toronto Scarborough, where he serves as the
      Program Supervisor for the International Development Studies program.

      Alma and Leslie co-founded the Open Access Scholarly Information
      Sourcebook (OASIS) <http://www.openoasis.org/>  and the Global Open
      Access Map <http://www.openaccessmap.org/> .

      Best,

      Susan

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