Open Source and Open Access

The open source and open access movements, both philosophical concepts as well as models of information flow, have been instrumental in the development of the business of free. This chapter defines both models and traces their history. Open source shaped the growth of the Web and changed consumer expectations, and as a result, companies have developed various ways to generate revenue even while giving their products away. The open access movement grew in tandem with electronic publishing and has led to both the user expectation of free content and a question of how publications can survive that expectation. Open source and open access will continue to influence the software industry, which is developing a “freemium” model for generating revenue from free products. The publishing industry will need to evolve radically, and open source and open access may also drive the integration of “open government” principles into our political systems.

2017 ◽  
Vol 78 (4) ◽  
pp. 406
Author(s):  
Emily Ford

Open source. Open access. Open data. Open notebooks. Open government. Open educational resources. Open access workflows. To be open is to have a disposition favoring transparent and collaborative efforts.Open is everywhere. Since the late 90’s when developers in Silicon Valley adopted the term ‘open source’ (suggested by Christine Peterson), the open movement has grown by leaps and bounds. The developers, who met after the web browser company Netscape made its source code open, articulated that ‘open’ “…illustrated a valuable way to engage with potential software users and developers, and convince them to create and improve source code by participating in an engaged community.”1 It also separated ‘open source’ “…from the philosophically- and politically-focused label ‘free software.’”2


Author(s):  
Luc Schneider

This contribution tries to assess how the Web is changing the ways in which scientific knowledge is produced, distributed and evaluated, in particular how it is transforming the conventional conception of scientific authorship. After having properly introduced the notions of copyright, public domain and (e-)commons, I will critically assess James Boyle's (2003, 2008) thesis that copyright and scientific (e-) commons are antagonistic, but I will mostly agree with the related claim by Stevan Harnad (2001a,b, 2008) that copyright has become an obstacle to the accessibility of scientific works. I will even go further and argue that Open Access schemes not only solve the problem of the availability of scientific literature, but may also help to tackle the uncontrolled multiplication of scientific publications, since these publishing schemes are based on free public licenses allowing for (acknowledged) re-use of texts. However, the scientific community does not seem to be prepared yet to move towards an Open Source model of authorship, probably due to concerns related to attributing credit and responsability for the expressed hypotheses and results. Some strategies and tools that may encourage a change of academic mentality in favour of a conception of scientific authorship modelled on the Open Source paradigm are discussed.


F1000Research ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Corpas ◽  
Rafael Jimenez ◽  
Seth J Carbon ◽  
Alex García ◽  
Leyla Garcia ◽  
...  

BioJS is a community-based standard and repository of functional components to represent biological information on the web. The development of BioJS has been prompted by the growing need for bioinformatics visualisation tools to be easily shared, reused and discovered. Its modular architecture makes it easy for users to find a specific functionality without needing to know how it has been built, while components can be extended or created for implementing new functionality. The BioJS community of developers currently provides a range of functionality that is open access and freely available. A registry has been set up that categorises and provides installation instructions and testing facilities at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/tools/biojs/. The source code for all components is available for ready use at https://github.com/biojs/biojs.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Pomerantz ◽  
Robin Peek

Open source. Open access. Open society. Open knowledge. Open government. Even open food. The word “open” has been applied to a wide variety of words to create new terms, some of which make sense, and some not so much. This essay disambiguates the many meanings of the word “open” as it is used in a wide range of contexts.


2015 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 76-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Somaly Kim Wu ◽  
Heather McCullough

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to presents the very recent development of e-journal publishing services at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Charlotte. In 2011, the J. Murrey Atkins Library at UNC Charlotte created a new unit in the library, the Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL), which partners with faculty and graduate students in the use of digital and networked research tools to create, disseminate and store new knowledge. E-journal publishing and hosting are among the suite of services offered by the DSL, and we currently publish three journals (https://journals.uncc.edu/). Design/methodology/approach – This report provides an overview of the context of our library’s decision to begin publishing journals, including a discussion of our university’s becoming more research-intensive, our university system mandating increased efficiencies and sharing research with the state citizens, and the library’s own goals of raising awareness of and supporting open access. Also outlined are the technical and procedural choices made, important activities undertaken to develop, define and publicize the new services, campus response to the service and next steps. Findings – This report provides detailed accounting of how a large academic library implemented an electronic publishing service to support open access scholarship. Important activities such as marketing communication, policies development and technical/procedural activities are defined and results described. The report provides observation and lessons learned for academic libraries in development and support of electronic journals. Originality/value – Library as the publisher is a new concept. This report will be of interest to many libraries who are considering offering publishing services and to libraries that currently offer publishing services.


ABI-Technik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 223-233
Author(s):  
Barbara Hirschmann

ZusammenfassungIm Sommer 2017 lancierte die ETH-Bibliothek nach rund dreijähriger Projektphase die Research Collection, eine neue Publikationsplattform für die Forschenden an der ETH Zürich. Die Plattform vereint die Funktionen einer Hochschulbibliographie, eines Open-Access-Repository und eines Forschungsdaten-Repository unter einem Dach. Sie wurde auf Basis der Open-Source-Software DSpace implementiert und löste zugleich zwei Vorgängersysteme ab. Heute ist die Research Collection ein zentraler Baustein innerhalb der hochschulweiten Informationsinfrastruktur der ETH Zürich.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melanie J Hopkins

“Electronic publishing” can mean a variety of things, but for the dissemination of scientific results, there are two major categories: 1) materials that have not gone through peer-review, such as community-database entries, presentations from conferences, and manuscripts posted on preprint servers; and 2) materials that have gone through peer-review and are subsequently posted online. In the latter case, the process of peer-review is usually managed by a body of editors associated with a journal. If a manuscript is published by such a journal, the reader can be assured that it went through the peer-review process successfully. In the last decade or so, journals have started to abandon printed issues of peer-reviewed articles and are now publishing exclusively online; there have also been a proliferation of new online-only journals. Concurrently, there has been a shift towards open-access publishing, which, while making scientific studies more broadly available, has also transferred the financial burden from the reader or subscriber to the authors and funding agencies. Lastly, there has been a shift in how manuscripts on preprint servers are viewed, and it is increasingly common in many scientific fields for authors to post a finalized manuscript to a preprint server prior to submission to a journal. This talk will describe the “Peer Community In” (PCI) Project, which is a non-profit organization that was established in response to these major shifts in scientific publishing. The PCI Project is comprised of communities of researchers working in different fields (including paleontology), who peer review and recommend research articles publicly available on preprint servers. The goal is to promote rigorous scientific study by providing an alternative to traditional avenues for peer-reviewed publishing.


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