The main idea behind “Head Start” is to save you weeks of searching and reading by delivering you at a glance the main areas and papers in a field. This is especially addressed to young PhD students and established researchers venturing into new neighboring fields.
Peter Kraker, research assistant at Know-Center and current Panton Fellow, released a new version of his open source visualization “Head Start” allowing people to gain a more precise overview of a research field. His interview about open science in research is available in a podcast.
You can find an application for the field of educational technology on Mendeley Labs. Papers are grouped by research area, and you can zoom into each area to see the individual papers’ metadata and a preview (or the full text in case of open access publications). The prototype is based on readership data from the online reference management system Mendeley. The idea is that the more often two papers are read together, the closer they are subject-wise.
If you want to know more about open science in general please refer to a podcast featuring Peter Kraker speaking about the importance of open science.
Links:
OKF Open Science Working Group: http://science.okfn.org/2014/02/24/new-version-of-open-source-visualization-head-start-released/
Podcast about Open Science in research: http://openscienceasap.org/stream/2014/02/24/osia3-open-science-in-der-forschung/