Michael Roy, The Open-Source Bazaar Makes Scholarship Available, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 24, 2004 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: "The adoption of proprietary course-management systems by most universities inhibits progress in that direction [of widely accessible scholarly information] because learning materials that were once available on course Web pages are now hidden behind passwords and no longer show up in search-engine results....Even projects like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's well-intentioned OpenCourseWare initiative do more to document existing practices than to encourage a rethinking of teaching and doing scholarship online. And many of the most innovative projects are handicapped by a copyright system that makes sharing derivative works for educational use cumbersome, if not impossible....We can learn from the world of software development. Eric S. Raymond, a well-known advocate of open-source programs, describes two worlds of software development: the cathedral and the bazaar....We in higher education should think about whether we produce knowledge in the world of the cathedral or that of the bazaar....In an age when a textbook often costs more than $100, when journal prices are skyrocketing, and when scholarly presses routinely produce only a hundred copies of a monograph, we need to know more about the open-source techniques that make it easier to create and share intellectual property."
In the same article, Roy mentions Academic Commons, a web site he is developing to address these needs. Still under construction and due to launch in January 2005, "the site will collect stories and projects that document the evolving nature of teaching and research, and encourage collaboration that will lead to open-source teaching and research."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/20/2004 09:10:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
