Sharing research in the 21st century: borrowing a page from open source software

T he Internet continues to evolve and digital devices continue to emerge, increasing the possibilities for reshaping how we work. The technology revolution has impacted many aspects of society including the research publishing industry. Increasingly, hard copy journals and other scholarly material are made available online. Although many traditional research publications are now online, little has changed regarding the process used to create and publish research. The notion of an open document has recently emerged with regard to books. Bruce Perens and Prentice-Hall have initiated an effort to publish open books with an accompanying open book license [3]. This license, like the one proposed in this article for open source research, is similar to the GPL used with open source software. One of academia’s chief responsibilities is research and publication. This article proposes an alternative approach—an open source research approach—to research and publication. Two distinguishing aspects of the open source research approach are the extensive use of Internet technologies and variations in the current copyright practice. The open source research approach borrows significantly from the process used by the open source software movement. As stated in the Techweb encyclopedia online, open source software is: “Free source code of a program, which is made available to the development community at large. The rationale is that a broader group of programmers will ultimately produce a more useful and more bug-free product for everyone, especially because more people will be reviewing the code. Peer review is considered one of the most important safeguards to prevent buggy code, but is often not given enough, if any, attention by software companies. Peer review is a natural by-product of open source projects. In addition to having better code, open source software allows an organization to modify the product for its own use rather than hope that the vendor of a proprietary product will implement its suggestions in a subsequent release. Examples of popular open source programs are the Apache Web server, sendmail mail server, and Linux operating system.” BORROWING A PAGE FROM OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE