Using the Open Source Model for Research and Distribution

Lowe suggests that the Open Source community's use of copyright to enforce the freedoms they value provides a strong model for the academic community. He applauds the Public Library of Science's call for open copyright publication of scientific research and urges humanities scholars to follow suit. Some other models humanities scholars can use include the "Open Content" model and the "Creative Commons" license. Such licenses rely on copyright law in the same way the GPL does, using legislation to insure open distribution.

However, while Lowe and others have suggested that the Open Source model maps well to publishing options, few have suggested integrating the innovative Open Source development model. We would be wise to heed Faber's reminder that "Open Source is about process" (2002, p. 36). Perhaps Open Source provides the best model when developers follow its example in both process and publication. These two aspects each offer useful guidelines for academia. Indeed, each aspect has already been integrated, at some level, in the academic research arena. We propose to expand such implementations by explicitly foregrounding their relationship to Open Source.

Development. As suggested above, the academic publication model already uses some of the same mechanisms Open Source does. For instance, most reputable journals in the field maintain their status as such by being peer-reviewed. (Such journals vet articles for publication through a series of reviewers, who make suggestions for revision or alteration.) While this process works in a similar way to the Open Source model, there are distinct differences:

• Release schedule—in Open Source, applications are reviewed after release, being honed and re-released; academia reviews and hones items before releasing them. An Open Source system might make use of a conversation period conducted with on-site blogs or other reader-boards. Authors might then revise (after some set period) and issue a second, more complete version of the piece.
• Reviewer numbers—academic journals generally assign two or three reviewers to read and comment upon an article; the Open Source community performs "massively parallel peer review," sometimes using hundreds of programmers. This increase in volume, determined by interest and availability, changes the nature of the peer review. One example of a system that uses this sort of work is Project Green Light. Authors who submitted screenplays for the most recent contest were required to "review three (3) screenplays during the Round 1 Review Period" (2004) as part of the winnowing process. Perhaps a journal could make use of a similar "halo" system of reviewers.
• Authors—academia still resists multiple authors in a way that Open Source does not. While some authors write together (and Composition seems more open to this than other fields), the position of co-authored articles in the tenure-review process has not been resolved very well (Ede & Lunsford, 1990).

Publishing. The Academic publishing model, more than any other element, obstructs the use of the Open Source model to write academic texts. Because academic publishing—particularly in journals—is so prohibitively expensive, publishers seek to retain controlling copyright on the works they publish. Such control contrasts strongly with Open Source ideology:

• Access—Academic publications are restricted, either physically or electronically, to organizations willing and able to pay often-exhorbitant subscription rates. Open Source predicates on free access to all. Some science journals have solved this problem. Rather than restricting all access to their content, they restrict only the most recent work (for instance, within the last year). This way, the most valuable work still brings in revenue while archives are open to all.
• Reproduction—The GPL requires open alteration and reproduction of its technologies; Academic publishers usually restrict such access. Unfortunately, this problem will exist as long as publishers rely on publishing avenues as expensive as print. Because electronic publishing makes low-cost, large-scale reproduction feasible, publishers can consider using open models to make publications widely available.

Academics must learn, then, from Open Source publishing models. As Lowe and others have argued, publishing under an "Open Content" license would be a strong start.

Engineering Open Source Scholarly Projects

There are certain kinds of documents that translate more easily to this model. Among the most prominent are databases of information that can be written collaboratively. Johndan Johnson-Eilola, for example, has suggested that Open Source can provide useful development models for authors of online documentation. We suggest using Open Source to author knowledge databases such as Encyclopedias or annotated bibliographies. Wikipedia is a particularly good example.

Previous: Publishing diverges
Next: Open Source Pedagogy