Governments appear to be in thrall to 'open'. Social sharing and exchange has emerged as a new and significant factor that competes with conventional market modes of production. Higher education (HE) and its libraries are exploiting the shift in the information economy and increasingly exploiting the opportunities derived from open source software, open data and open content. However, being open is a means not an end. Re-use leading to impact is the goal and the evidence of re-use is patchy, and especially weak for open data. Commercial non-open approaches such as iTunes are reasserting themselves and finding that users will pay for the convenience even if there are open and free alternatives.
This article derives from my presentation at the 2011 UKSG conference. It is not an attempt to deal comprehensively with all the 'open' aspects of library environments. Instead I will unravel just a few threads of the overall tapestry.
'Open' is certainly in the air. Governments from the UK1 to New Zealand2 appear to be in thrall to open. Indeed, put open in front of almost any noun and it provides a more positive warm edge: open government; open access, open educational resources. Neither is the business world immune to the lure of open. Back in 2003, Henry Chesbrough talked about a shift to openness in the business innovation paradigm: 'Open innovation assumes that firms can and should use external as well as internal ideas. Open innovation assumes that internal ideas can also be taken to market through external channels'.3 This theme was picked up and popularized by Tapscott and Williams in 2006 with the bestseller Wikinomics: 'Leading firms are opening up pertinent information … because they reap significant benefits from doing so'. Commercial software applications often rely on open source components such as the Apache web server or Linux operating system. In the library sector commercial discovery services such as Primo from ExLibris and Summon from Serial Solutions use the same underlying applications as their open source competitors such as VuFind and Blacklight.
government/non-profit: a centralized, non-market-based exchange system.
IP telephony is competing with traditional telecoms industry.
Social production therefore represents a new, fourth transactional framework. Benkler argues that social production is not a fad. While it does represent a new form of competition for incumbents, it also represents a new source of opportunity for everyone.
Let us look at the motivations and benefits behind three major stands as they apply in higher education: open data, open content and open source software.
One of the key shifts in HE over the last few years has been the move to making more content open. In part this has been a response to what some have seen as an increasingly 'closed' environment in scholarly communication. The EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS) organization has characterized the situation in the following way: 'What was once a system of open and shared scholarly communication, owned and managed by the academy and associated scholarly societies, has transformed into a 'Closed Access' model where ownership resides largely outside the academy in the hands of commercial companies and with the scholarly research record quarantined behind access-barriers that only those who have the money to pay for subscriptions, licenses or purchases can traverse'.10 The open access movement has spawned open access (OA) journals and open educational resources (OER). The key benefit is increased access. 'Bills are not paid by readers (or by the library) 'and hence do not function as access barriers'.11 It is claimed that free access and openly sharing content increases impact. Open.Michigan initiative 'encourages researchers, learners, and instructors to maximize the impact and reach of their scholarly work through open sharing'12 In this way they hope to achieve their aim 'to enable faculty, students, staff and others to share their educational resources and research with the global learning community'.
Open source 'guru' Eric Raymond describes one of the key benefits of open source software as 'lower costs'.13 A survey in 201014 reported: 'Low cost has helped open source endure the economic down-turn and emerge even healthier. For the third year, survey respondents said that low costs are the most attractive aspect of open source technology'. However, other benefits are increasingly coming to the fore. The same survey identified 'rapid innovation' as perhaps the most exciting new driver. Buyers specifically recognize that open source can deliver innovation faster than proprietary software. In a library system market which has seen slow rates of innovation, libraries may be drawn to an open source environment that can 'create and release new features immediately by the people and organizations that need them'.15 The frustrations of (US) higher education institutions were expressed in a 2006 Ithaka report16 that spoke of market failure and a 'historical disconnect between producers of software and HE users, who have complex, unique, and poorly understood needs'. It went on to say: 'We are convinced that collaborative efforts to build open source applications can produce software that better meets the needs of partner institutions and also has the potential to benefit the broader community'. Although the report was not specifically concerned with library software, it lead indirectly to the creation of the Open Library Environment (OLE) project which has progressed into Kuali OLE 17 which 'intends to deliver nothing less than an enterprise-ready, community source software package for academic and research libraries'.
'A business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers and captures value.'18. Where software code and scholarly content is open and available with no revenue accruing from it how can a sustainable business model be built? How can organizations 'capture' the value? After all, there are costs in running these initiatives so how can they be sustained over the long terms? Commercial companies such as PTFS-Europe help to sustain open source products not by charging a software fee but instead adding value for libraries in terms of implementation, support and development. Organizations such as the Open University, MIT or Michigan justify 'giving away' content as part of an educational mission that is supported to a large extent by government, donor or charitable funding. Wikipedia is funded by the Wikimedia Foundation which is a non-profit charitable organization 'dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge'. The people who create and edit the content for free are members of Benkler's social economy. Gold open access shifts the costs of producing journal articles to the author (or their institution or research funder) rather than subscription fees. Many OER initiatives have obtained 'seed resources' from private foundations and public authorities.
Being open presents challenges as well as opportunity. Re-use is perhaps the key success factor. There is some evidence that open access has a positive effect on re-use and impact of journal articles.19 However, much – probably most – open metadata and open content simply does not get reused. The Open Knowledge Foundation lists a large and growing number of open data sets in the Library Archive and Museum (LAM) domain but most have little or no evidence of re-use. Many open source projects and communities fail. Despite taking an upbeat stance on open source, a survey in 2010 by Accenture20 found that just 29 per cent of organizations are willing to share their own developments with the rest of the community.
New Zealand Government Cabinet paper Open Government CAB Min (11) 29/12. 8August2011: http://www.ict.govt.nz/library/Open%20Govt%20 Cab%20Min.pdf (accessed 27 September).
Chesbrough, H , Open Innovation: The new imperative for creating and profiting from technology, 2003, Harvard Business School Press.
Benkler, Y , The Wealth of Networks, 2006, Harvard.
Cited in O'Driscoll, T , Social production as a new source of economic value creation, 3March2010: http://opensource.com/business/10/2/social-production-new-source-economic-value-creation#comments/ (accessed 27 September).
Bowen, W G : quote from the foreword by William G Bowen, president emeritus, Andrew W Mellon Foundation and Princeton University. In: The Master switch. The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim, Wu. Knopf ed. , 2010, ISBN 978-0307269935.
Mitchell, E , Understanding the impact of open and distributed computing, Blog, 7January2011. http://www.erikmitchell.info/2011/01/07/understanding-the-impact-of-open-and-distributed-computing/ (accessed 27 September).
Shadboldt, N , Open for Business, Open Knowledge Foundation Blog, 3April2011: http://blog.okfn.org/2011/04/03/open-for-business/ (accessed 27 September).
For a list of signatories see http://discovery.ac.uk/businesscase/signatories/ (accessed 27 September).
From the website Open scholarship: http://www.openscholarship.org/jcms/j_6/home (accessed 27 September).
Suber, P , 'Open Access Overview, Focusing on open access to peer-reviewed research articles and their preprints'. (Revised November2010): http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm (accessed 27 September).
Kleymeer, P, Kleinman, M and Hanss, T , 'Reaching the Heart of the University: Libraries and the Future of OER. Presented at the Open Education 2010 Conference, Barcelona. 2-4 November 2010. http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78006/1/ReachingtheHeartoftheUniversity-KleymeerKleinmanHanss.pdf (accessed 27 September).
Raymond, E , The cathedral and the bazaar, O'Reilly, rev. edition 2001.
'Future of Open Source' North Bridge Venture Partners2010: http://www.slideshare.net/AcquiaInc/2010-future-of-open-source-survey-results (accessed 27 September).
Future of Open Source North Bridge Venture Partners 2010, ref. 14.
Courant, P N and Griffiths, R J , Software and Collaboration in Higher Education: A Study of Open Source Software, Ithaka, 26July2006. http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/strategyold/oss/OOSS_Report_FINAL.pdf (accessed 27 September).
Kuali Foundation: http://www.kuali.org/ole (accessed 27 September).
Nguyen, A , Accenture believe open source adoption by CIOs is taking off. In: Computerworld UK, 6August2010: http://www.cio.co.uk/news/3234464/accenture-believe-open-source-adoption-by-cios-is-taking-off/ (accessed 27 September).
Anderson, C and Wolff, M , The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet (17 August 2010). In: WiredSeptember2010 edition: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1 (accessed 27 September).