The Internet promises a revolution in the means of production and distribution of knowledge, a promise as yet only partially realised. This is why we are working to expand social and technical frontiers in the production of text, so that academic publishing gains the immediacy, speed and accessibility of the web while nevertheless maintaining—and we would hope enhancing—the intellectual standards of legacy peer refereed journals.
To support these kinds of emerging knowledge communities, Common Ground has an ambitious research and development agenda, creating cutting edge ‘social web’ technologies and exploring new relationships of knowledge validation.
Current Common Ground publishing software represents Version 2.X of a research and development agenda we began in 2000. We are currently working on a Version 3.0, including the following stand-alone modules:
CGScholar
A social networking space for academics and other knowledge experts to promote their professional profiles, engage with peers, and find out about events and news in their respective disciplines and fields—like Facebook and MySpace, but with individuals and communities defined by disciplines and subject matter.
CGAuthor
An online authoring and word processing tool which focuses on the key functions of knowledge research, including citation management, peer-to-peer collaboration and variable outputs for web, print and word processing environments—like Google Docs, but with has specific functionalities (e.g. citation management and typesetting) that Google Docs lacks and which are necessary for academic publishing.
CGPublisher
A publishing workflow engine, which allows publishers to design and manage publishing processes, including peer review.
CGConference
A conference management system for handling proposals, registrations and programs—and also for publishing conference presentation content, much of which is currently lost to conference organizers.
CGOntology
A tool for developing, comparing and publishing formal knowledge systems as Semantic Web ontologies, and the foundation of Common Ground software integration.