Christopher Kelty has edited a collection of articles, Culture's Open Sources: Software, Copyright, and Cultural Critique, just published in the September issue of Anthropological Quarterly. What's unusual is that this collection is open-access and released under a Creative Commons license, apparently a first for AQ. Excerpt from Kelty's introduction, describing the topic: "For business and management scholars, free and open source software represents an alternative model of software development --one that seems to challenge the conventional wisdom of industrial organization by allowing geographically far-flung individuals to collaborate in real-time and with great success on large and complex software systems. For economists and economically-minded researchers, it has generated a veritable 'infolanche' of speculation about the ostensible paradox of 'motivation:' why anyone would spend so much unpaid time building software only to give it away for free online. It is here that the old anthropological standby of the 'gift economy' has been given a new treble-mortgaged lease on life as a solution to the putative problem of motivation. For lawyers and legal theorists, free and open source software represent a new combination (a legal hack) of copyright and contract law --one that creates a 'privatized public domain' or 'commons' which has been the object of both opprobrium and advocacy." (Congratulations to Kelty and AQ for this step toward OA scholarship in anthropology.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/06/2004 10:15:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
