Open Access and the Public Domain in Digital Data and Information for Science Proceedings of an International Symposium (2004) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
25 The Open-Source Paradigm and the Production of Scientific Information: A Future Vision and Implications for Developing Countries
25 The Open-Source Paradigm and the Production of Scientific Information: A Future Vision and Implications for Developing Countries
Pages 103-109
The Chapter Skim interface presents what we've algorithmically identified as the most significant single chunk of text within every page in the chapter.
Select key terms on the right to highlight them within pages of the chapter.
From page 103... ...
Such a collaborative paradigm could increase the ability to harness global collective action toward solving many difficult and complex problems that humanity faces and could have important implications for greater participation and communication between scientists and academics worldwide. To describe this vision more fully this presentation will first discuss the general design principles of opensource projects based on research of literature on open-source programming, and some of our own preliminary empirical research.
|
From page 104... ...
The Linux operating system and the Apache Web server are two high-profile open-source success stories. They provide examples of how the open-source collaborative paradigm can produce solutions to very complex problems.
|
From page 105... ...
More recently analyses have shown that there are primary economic motivations, either to build skills for future economic gain or to self-promote. Regarding skill building, open source provides a valuable distancelearning function; over the Internet the programmer can look at the source code, learn about how other people approach a programming problem, try to do their own enhancements, and then participate in a system of peer review in which they receive critical feedback.
|
From page 106... ...
, which is placing e-books in the public domain on the Internet, the Free Software Foundation's GNU Free Documentation license10 to support the open-content development of software documentation, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology OpenCourseWare11 project, in which academics share course content using open-content licensing.
|
From page 107... ...
In 2002 we conducted a review of existing land cover change models and identified more than twenty developed by various organizations and funded by a variety of agencies.12 These models can be extremely complex to use and understand because of the different technologies and academic disciplines that are represented within them. Our ability to build on advances made in these models is relatively low, mainly because of the significant costs involved in acquiring needed software technologies, and learning and applying these models once the technical infrastructure is available.
|
From page 108... ...
In our example of land cover change modeling this might include papers on final results, but also papers on theoretical inputs that inform a model design, papers on how to use the model, as well as the other important products for the modeling endeavor, such as data sets and the model source or logic itself. If a researcher contributed a new module to the model (e.g., extended the model's functionality)
|
From page 109... ...
The literature up until early 2003 is fairly naive on how open-source projects are structured, and a major point of our talk was that there is a desperate need to understand what leads to success and failure of these projects, rather than basing all our knowledge on just the high-profile success stories, Linux and Apache Web Server, which may be anomalies. Fortunately more carefully crafted quantitative studies and deeper analyses on these projects are beginning to emerge.
|
Key Terms
This material may be derived from roughly machine-read images, and so is provided only to facilitate research.
More
information on Chapter Skim is available.