Speaking of oof. Oxford Journals now makes it possible for authors to make their work open access. Yay! But it comes at a cost:
Apparently they have a very different assessment of the statement “information wants to be free.”
The use of the word “open” as an adjective in front of an unexpected noun is ever expanding. At least it seems that way sometimes. It began of course with the coinage of the term open source, as in open source software. The source in that instance is the source code for the software, which is distinct from the compiled, binary code that one actually runs when using software. Source code looks something like this:
if (user clicks on this)
then (do this)
Whereas, what the computer actually needs in order to understand that is something that looks like this:
0100100101001010010010001010110011101010100
Which means that even if the binary code for a piece of software was open to its users, it couldn’t do them much good.
The idea behind open source software is fundamentally that you should not only be able to use a piece of software, to do whatever it is you want to do, but also to be able to improve it or at least modify it to make it do what you need it to do. What this idea enabled was tens of thousands of people all around the world, suddenly able to communicate (and thus able to form a community) thanks to the internet, to do was to collaborate in a new way to make an entire software ecosystem. (See Eric Raymond’s “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”.)
Their first steps, in turn, inspired others and the open access movement was born. (My friend Jason Jackson is not only really articulate about this, he also puts his money where his mouth is every day.) Open access is an attempt to make important sources of knowledge available, accessible, to anyone interested and with a small modicum of resources, especially access to the internet. In many cases, open access stands in opposition to traditional, in the historical sense of that word, venues for knowledges distribution which are often tied to third parties like commercial publishers who collect a huge markup for being middle men.
In the era of a worldwide communications network, the middle is no longer needed as vessel. Other middles — reviewers and editors and UI designers — remain important in many ways. The publishing and scholarly worlds are still trying to figure out how to maintain one middle without the other. Some just want to pay for the necessary infrastructure; others of course seek to profit as much as they can.
Open source and open access have inspired the coinage of a lot of other opens. By far the most interesting one to me is the idea of open innovation. Glyn Moody’s Slideshare presentation does a nice job of encapsulating the idea, which is also the basis for a number of recent books and the professional careers of a lot of pundits/consultants. (I really need to figure out how to become one of those.) I have embedded the slides below — it’s a Flash package, sorry. 25 slides. Less than five minutes.
Please don’t forget that there is a lot of great music out there that is already available under very generous licenses. Some folks are creating amazing bits of music and they deserve the exposure that your podcast, video, or lecturecast might give them. (What? You are not considering a soundtrack for your lecturecast?)
Here’s just a small sample. I went looking for something fairly “spare” in terms of sound, and I wanted something acoustical. Layers of a single instrument — like Bill Conti’s “Black and White x 5″ — always get me:
It reminds me a little bit of the soundtrack to Rosencrants and Guildenstern Are Dead, which, if memory serves me, was done by Snuffy Walden, who also did some interesting soundtrack work for the television series thirtysomething. (Goodness, that goes back a bit.)
My continuing thanks to everyone at Indiana University who works on this project and makes it possible. It keeps getting better, even if my use of it doesn’t. Here’s the link.
Karl Fogel’s book, Producing Open Source Software, is available in its entirety on the web. For those in a hurry, it’s available as a single HTML page. As Jason Jackson has made clear, scholars should think of themselves as producing open source materials. Why not think more clearly about the processes involved? (It might make, at least, for better scholarship and better teaching of scholarship, and, at best, it might lead to innovative forms of scholarship.)
In addition to the book, Fogel also has some useful links, e.g. a Google video about how a project can survive the people who are interested in it.
Digital Scholarship maintains an open access bibliography which includes not only a list of journals but also guides to setting up open access materials:
The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals (ISBN 1-59407-670-7) provides an overview of open access concepts, and it presents over 1,300 selected English-language books, conference papers (including some digital video presentations), debates, editorials, e-prints, journal and magazine articles, news articles, technical reports, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding the open access movement’s efforts to provide free access to and unfettered use of scholarly literature. Most sources have been published between 1999 and August 31, 2004; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 1999 are also included. Where possible, links are provided to sources that are freely available on the Internet (approximately 78 percent of the bibliography’s references have such links).
Sometimes the series of connections that is the internet (not the wires but the ideas) is truly amazing. As many readers of this blog know, my editor of choice is Textmate. Textmate made quite a hit when it premiered on the Mac platform, which up until that time really only had BBedit for users in need of a heavy-duty editor. (Was XCode available and useful then?) BBedit had a free version, but if you wanted the full version, it was expensive. Textmate was €39 — which was closer to $39 then than it is now. Textmate also possessed the amazing ability to be extended in utility by its users, who quickly proceeded to share bundles of snippeds, commands, and macros with each other.
Linux and Windows users who saw Textmate, perhaps through David Hansen’s famous Rails screencasts, wanted to know when its developer, Allan Odgaard was going to port his application over their preferred platforms. Allan steadfastly refused, and in a move that surprised everyone, seemed perfectly happy when Alexander Stigsen began to develop an editor not only a lot like Textmate but also one that could use adapted Textmate bundles — the very engine of Textmate’s success. I occasionally checked out the E Text Editor, but because I don’t work on Linux or Windows, I never paid any serious attention.
All that has changed with Stigsen’s announcement that he is going to turn his stable, profitable, conventional software company into an open company.
What does that mean? The first thing he has made the application’s source open — except for a small, central portion that he maintains as proprietary. The next step is to set up a venue in which individuals can participate and begin to feel their way around the project — the code, the tasks at hand, the procedures. What he hopes will happen is that as some individuals become more interested in working, they will find themselves commensurately compensated. (The mechanism he has planned is worth reading on his site.)
Why is this an interesting series of connections? Because these kinds of enterprises are exactly the kind of thing that I think we should not only be studying in the academy but also replicating.
