Open Source, Open Science, OpenCourseWare

Abstract

The Internet has in just a few years radically changed the technical foundation for how the supply chain of scientific publications and teaching materials functions. As researchers we can with just a few clicks find a significant part of all the information we need for free on the World Wide Web. As teachers we can find huge amounts of digital material which can be downloaded or linked from the web and included in presentation overheads, or hyperlinked as reading material. Yet the business and legal (copyright issues) infrastructure has hardly changed and presents a barrier to innovation and reengineering of the overall process. This paper describes some recent trends in how the Internet influences these two fields (publication of research resuls and production of teaching material) as well as related developments in the organisation of software develop-ment, and discusses them both from an economic and philosophical perspective.