An Introduction to Open Source, Open Standards, and Open Access for Librarians

Edward M. Corrado

The College of New Jersey

Open Source Software (OSS)

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  • Free as in Freedom
  • Free Software vs. Open Source Software (different philosophies)

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Examples of OSS

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Some vendors (VTLS/Oxford announcement) build on top of OSS

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Advantages of OSS

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  • No acquistions costs
  • One system has spent millions and has nothing to show for it
  • Migrating can be expensive (and some stuff may not be possible to migrate) and hard on staff

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Open Standards

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  • If the standard meets the first two criteria it is open in utility. If it meets all three it is open in process as well.
  • Dublin Core is open in process and utility
  • XHTML is open in process only

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Open Standards in Libraries

Why Open Standards?

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"The way to make certain that these diverse systems, and any future systems, can communicate with each other is by using open standards to help achieve the 'free flow of information through interoperability'" (Corrado, 2005)

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Open Access

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Willinsky's 9 Flavors of Open Access (Bold are "true" Open Access:

  1. e-print archive (authors self-archive pre- or post-prints)
  2. unqualified (immediate and full open access publication of a journal
  3. dual mode (both print subscription and open access versions of a journal are offered)
  4. delayed open access (open access is available after a certain period of time)
  5. author fee (authors pay a fee to support open access)
  6. partial open access (some articles from a journal are available via open access)
  7. per-capita (open access is made available to countries based on per-capita income)
  8. abstract (open access available to table of contents/abstracts
  9. co-op (institutional members support open access journals).

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Why Open Access?

Putting it all together

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"By supporting open access, open source, and open standards libraries not only can help ensure that their current and future patrons will have easier and more comprehensive access to scholarly research, they will also be helping other libraries around the world, including those in disadvantaged areas, to have access to important scholarly research." (Corrado, 2005)

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Thank You

Edward M. Corrado
The College of New Jersey
corrado [at] tcnj.edu
http://www.tcnj.edu/~corrado/index.html

Creative Commons License
Unless otherwise indicated all of the works linked from this web page are licensed under the Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0. If you would like to use this work under a different license, please contact Edward M. Corrado.

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References:

  • Corrado, E. 2005. The importance of open access, open source, and open standards for libraries. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship 42. http://www.istl.org/05-spring/article2.html
  • Puntain, D. 2003. The Penguin Dictionary of Computing. New York: Penguin Putnam.
  • Willinsky, J. 2003. The nine flavors of open access scholarly publishing. Journal of Postgraduate Medicine 49: 263-267.

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