Open Source and Open Access |
| Open Source is an idea about intellectual property. Essentially, an open source approach treats a piece of intellectual proprerty as a shared good. For example, the source code for the ever more popular browser, Firefox, is available to anyone. If you know what you are doing, you can modify this code (and, hence, the browser) to suite your own purposes. If you are generous, you could then share these modifications with others, others who are also modifying the browser. Mozilla, the parent, if you will, periodically re-releases the software with these modifications. Meanwhile, Netscape, the for-profit entity that lurks behind Mozilla, benefits from the resources of its programmers AND those of Firefox. For profit entities can benefit from open source progamming and indeed some entitities, like IBM, are starting to let independent programmers tinker with their products. There are open source products, like Open Office, that provide powerful alternatives to the more popular (and expensive) applications, like Microsfot Office. |
| Open Access is another idea about intellectual property. Typically scholarly information is not freely available. To get the information you must either subscribe to a journal, belong to an association, be employed by some entity that subscribes to the journal or belongs to the association, or pay to belong to an entity (be a student at WIU) that subscribes to the journal or belongs to an association. Open Access Repositories are resource pools where information, including scholarly infomration, is freely available to the public. The California eScholarship Repository is a good example of one such repository. Some repositories (but not the California eScholraship repository) are built using using open source software, like Gemstone or Fedora to create these open access repositories. Here are some Gemstone examples. Here is one project, The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in Americas : A Visual Record that uses Fedora . Here is another, Boston Streets. Here is an open access database for library science. Here is the Public Library of Science, an open access peer reviewed journal collection. Here is the physics pre-print server, arXiv.org . Here is the University of Pennsylvania's Scholarly Commons. Here is the Georgia Institute of Technology's SmarTech repository. |
| Finally, MIT has revisioned itself as an open access repository of knowledge. It distributes its courses worldwide for free. |