Open Source in Higher Education: a Situational Analysis of the Open Journal Systems Software Project

OPEN SOURCE IN HIGHER EDUCATION: A SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS OF THE OPEN JOURNAL SYSTEMS SOFTWARE PROJECT

Mia Quint-Rapoport

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Theory and Policy Studies in Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto

OPEN SOURCE IN HIGHER EDUCATION: A SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS OF THE OPEN JOURNAL SYSTEMS SOFTWARE PROJECT Doctor of Philosophy, 2010 Mia Quint-Rapoport Graduate Department of Theory and Policy Studies in Education University of Toronto

Abstract

This research study looks at digital academic space, which is defined here as web-based digitally mediated artifacts produced by universities and their members. Open source software projects and the Open Access movement play large roles within digital academic space, not only because of their strong historical academic roots, but also because these projects are growing in prevalence in many universities. Framed by theories from the field of higher education and media studies, this research study is an analysis of the dynamics and effects of one open source software project that produces Open Access electronic journals. The software system, called the

Open Journal Systems (OJS), originally developed by an education professor from a Canadian university, has been adopted by thousands of universities worldwide to publish electronic peer reviewed academic journals. OJS users distributed at universities throughout the world have contributed software code back to the system, by for example, creating translation modules enabling users to publish journals in a range of languages thus adding an interesting global dimension to the project. Based on interviews with the OJS software developers, administrators, and users, as well as a range of material culled from online, this situational analysis of the OJS sketches out the conditions, dynamics, discourses and professional identities that form the basis of an emerging phenomenon within universities that is named here the digitally mediated open research project (DMORP).

Acknowledgments

This thesis is dedicated to my parents, Sylvia and Teddy Quint who have always been incredibly supportive of all of my educational pursuits. Mom and Dad, from you I have learned, among other things, how to think meaningfully and how to say the things that I think and feel. Without these traits I would never have been able to pursue my doctorate. Thank you.

This thesis represents the culmination of many hours of thinking and reflection, and a few hours of hard work. In many ways it is one of my greatest accomplishments. It does however stand alongside two other accomplishments of great importance to me: my two daughters Lilah Jean Rapoport and Chloe Quint Rapoport, both of whom were born while I wrote this thesis. How difficult it was to sit at my computer some days when all I wanted to do was play with you, dance with you, read to you and laugh with you! At the same time, you both provided me with such inspiration – you worked so hard at growing, learning to use your muscles to walk and clap, learning to form words to sing and talk. I love you both so much, and am so fiercely proud of everything you do. You are young now but one day I hope you will be proud of me too one day.

I am completely indebted to my husband, partner and best friend, Adam Rapoport, the hardest working of doctors, who always found the time to read my work, go over my presentations and listen to my ideas. Adam, I would never have been able to do this without you; you (dutifully) read every single word of my thesis (dutifully stating that it was not out of duty but out of interest). I am the luckiest woman on the planet. You have given me everything I have always wanted in life, our children and a life-long partner with whom I could be myself while continuing to learn, grow and reflect on life. I love you.

A big thank you goes to Professor John Willinsky, a dedicated and visionary scholar, thinker, and a rockin‘ musician. I would like to thank my supervisor, Prof. Glen Jones, who encouraged me along the thesis path, as well as my committee members Megan Boler and Jamie-Lynn Magnusson for teaching me how to think critically about my subject. Thanks go to as well to Avi Hyman and Michael Peters whose insights about my thesis have been precious and invaluable.

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgments ...... iii

Chapter 1: Exploring the Frontiers of Digital Academic Space ...... 1

1.1 Towards a definition of ‗digital academic space‘ ...... 2

1.1.1 Foundations of digital academic space: Open source software and Open access movements ...... 4

1.1.2 Open academic publishing via the Open Journal System (OJS) ...... 8

1.2 From ivory tower to the babbling bazaar: Sophisticated discourses of open source software ...... 14

1.2.1 ―Raymondism‖ ...... 14

1.2.2 Free as in Libre: ‗Stallmanism‘...... 16

1.2.3 Academic open source software projects ...... 18

1.3 Using ‗situational analysis‘ to theorize digital academic space ...... 21

1.3.1 The structure of this analysis ...... 22

1.3.2 Three narratives of digital academic space ...... 23

1.4 Towards a new ideal-type in the academic environment ...... 24

1.4.1 Outlining the conditions of Digitally Mediated Open Research Projects (DMORP) ...... 24

1.5 Characteristics of Digitally Mediated Open Research Projects ...... 25

Chapter 2: Liquid Networks: The Literature of Open Culture, Open Source Software and the Open Access Movement ...... 29

2.1 Is a participatory commons reliant on free labour? The literature of free and open culture ...... 30

2.1.1 Open but hierarchical: Examining the character of networked collaboration ...... 34

2.1.2 Free cooperation, dense networks ...... 36

2.1.3 From open culture to open source software: Scholarly research about the open source software movement ...... 38

2.1.4 Open source software defined ...... 39

2.2 Early research on open source software ...... 40

2.1.2 Empirical research on open source software: From political economy to ethnography to the ‗fetishization‘ of code ...... 42

2.2.2 Open source software as a revolutionary socio-cultural phenomenon ...... 48

2.2.3 The Intersection of open source software and universities ...... 51

2.3 The literature about the Open Access movement ...... 55

2.3.1 Benefits to ―developing‖ countries ...... 56

2.3.2 Information doubt: Skepticism regarding the benefits of Open Access for ‗development‘ ...... 57

2.3.3 Open Access advocacy in science, technology and medicine ...... 58

2.3.4 Open Access or knowledge hegemony: Thinking critically about Open Access benefits ...... 59

2.4 Bits and bytes of free and open culture: Concluding remarks regarding the literature of open culture, open source and Open Access ...... 60

Chapter 3: From the Condition of Publicity to Academic Capitalism: The Literature of Contemporary Higher Education ...... 63

3.1 Change as a defining feature of contemporary higher education ...... 64

3.1.1 Mode 1 versus Mode 2 research ...... 66

3.1.2 ICTs in higher education ...... 68

3.1.3 Cyber-infrastructure projects ...... 70

3.1.4 The condition of publicity ...... 71

3.1.5 Globalization and higher education ...... 73

3.1.6 The GloNaCal Agency heuristic ...... 77

3.1.7 The development function as an offshoot of global effects in higher education ...79

3.1.8 Problematizing the discourse of development ...... 82 v

3.1.9 Academic capitalism and neo-liberalism ...... 84

3.1.10 Bright spaces or dark spaces? ...... 86

Chapter 4: Situating this Analysis: Methodology and Methods for Capturing the Meaning of OJS ...... 88

4.1 Situational analysis ...... 89

4.1.1 Previous situational analyses ...... 92

4.2 Description of the study ...... 93

4.2.1 Detailed description of face to face interviews: Core members of the project ...... 95

4.2.2 Core OJS users ...... 98

4.3 Online and email interviews ...... 100

4.3.1 Detailed description of email interview respondents ...... 102

4.3.2 Description of the online surveys ...... 104

4.4 Analysis of journals ...... 104

4.4.1 Creating a strategy for capturing journal information ...... 109

4.5 Mapping, sensitizing concepts, memo-ing, discourse analysis...... 110

4.5.1 Use of Nvivo ...... 112

4.6 Limitations ...... 113

4.7 Conclusion ...... 114

Chapter 5: Anchoring Institutional Identities: The Role of Open Source Software in Establishing Institutional Identities ...... 117

5.1 From OJS to DMORPs ...... 117

5.2 Three narratives of digital academic space ...... 118

5.2.1 OJS: A ‗successful‘ open source software project ...... 119

5.2.2 Success as the cultivation of OJS user-producers ...... 121

5.2.3 Oral history of the PKP/OJS ...... 129

5.2.4 The PKP moves to SFU ...... 133

5.2.5 Institutional differentiation: UBC versus SFU ...... 143

5.2.6 The Synergies Project ...... 151

5.2.7 OJS as a ‗global‘-Canadian project...... 153

5.2.8 Open source software as an anchor in a time of ‗symbolic uncertainty‘ ...... 154

Chapter 6: ―Rock Stars by Night‖: Portrait of OJS Developers ...... 158

6.1 Portrait of the OJS developers ...... 160

6.2 The brotherly bond of open source software development ...... 165

6.3 Origins of developer involvement in the OJS ...... 167

6.4 OJS developers as independent consultants ...... 171

6.5 Geeks and anarchists: Understanding the identity of OJS developers ...... 171

6.6 Open source software development for freedom and equality ...... 177

6.7 Reproducing the role of the traditional academic ...... 182

Chapter 7: Roguish Behaviour: A Snapshot of OJS Users ...... 185

7.1 Overview of user responses to the email questionnaire ...... 188

7.1.1 Journal management ...... 189

7.1.2 Reasons for choosing the OJS...... 192

7.1.3 Customizations and bug reporting ...... 195

7.1.4 Belonging to an OJS community and participation in the user forums ...... 197

7.1.5 Technical skills levels of PKP/OJS users ...... 201

7.1.6 University support for OJS journals ...... 205

7.2 Roadblocks, criticisms, and effects of involvement with the PKP/OJS project ...... 208

7.2.1 Roadblocks and criticisms ...... 209

7.2.2 Effects of using the PKP/OJS ...... 212

7.2.3 OJS users work towards ‗development‘ ...... 213

7.2.3 OJS Journals take on ―development‖ ...... 216

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7.2.5 Towards the decolonization of DMORPs ...... 219

Chapter 8: The Characteristics of Digitally Mediated Open Research Projects ...... 223

8.1.1 Digitally mediated open research projects ...... 229

8.1.2 Characteristics of DMORPs ...... 230

8.1.3 The impact of DMORPs on higher education...... 235

8.1.4 Focus on power dynamics ...... 237

8.1.5 Open source software development in higher education contexts ...... 238

8.2 There must be more to this digital story ...... 239

References ...... 241

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List of Tables

Table 1 Face to Face Interview Participants ...... 95

Table 2 Core OJS Users ...... 99

Table 3 Overview of Email Interview Respondents ...... 102

Table 4 Overview of Journals ...... 107

Table 5 OJS Journals: Previous Format, Management, Funding ...... 190

Table 6 OJS Users: Reasons, Experience, Discovery of the Software ...... 193

Table 7 Customizations and Bug Reporting by OJS Users ...... 196

Table 8 User Responses: Community, Forum Participation, Effects ...... 199

List of Figures

Figure 1. Screenshot of a Canadian OJS journal...... 10

Figure 2. Screenshot of the Public Knowledge Project web site...... 11

Figure 3. Screenshot of the OJS journal Health and Human Rights: An International Journal. ...28

Figure 4. Screenshot of the OJS journal Community Literacy...... 62

Figure 5. Screenshot of the OJS journal Information Technologies & International Development...... 87

Figure 6. Screenshot of the OJS journal Scientific Journal of the Postgraduate Program in Communication Sciences of the University of São Paulo...... 116

Figure 7. Screenshot of the OJS journal African Journal of Infectious Diseases...... 157

Figure 8. Screenshot of the OJS journal Ethics and Global Politics...... 184

Figure 9. Screenshot of the OJS journal New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Studies...... 222

Chapter 1: Exploring the Frontiers of Digital Academic Space

Theorists of new media and Internet culture have seen great potential for resistance, activism and social reform as a result of Internet involvement (McCaughey & Ayers, 2003). They also, however, have shown how the internet is co-opted away from these possibilities, favouring instead social conservation (Rodman, Kolko, & Nakamura, 2000) and the strengthening of dominant and hegemonic forces (Sassen, 1998), finding new modalities for their expression. Interestingly, these two impulses occur simultaneously, so that ultimately internet culture cannot be characterized in only one way or as having a singular monolithic effect. Similarly, contemporary universities are spaces of contradictions, or in other words, ―multi-versities‖ as Kerr would have it (1972). They are institutions that are ―supercomplex‖(2000) and are at once moving in contradictory directions. They are constituted by, for example, academic activists, who have forged lifelong commitments to social causes and pursue research and create theory to fulfill these commitments- even though as Davies writes, the ―panopticon‖ of new management practices are eroding the powers of these academics (2003). They are also inhabited by academics who believe in the disinterestedness of science; who exhibit no reservations about commercializing their research and serving the project of ―academic capitalism‖(Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004) not to mention all of the academics (adjuncts, sessionals, students, researchers, and unionized and non-unionized staff) who are located in spaces in between these two positions. Both internet culture and contemporary university culture work for and against social, cultural and economic reproduction. This simultaneous dynamic of reproduction and dissent is but one commonality between these two cultural spheres. Indeed, references to internet culture and other phrasings that aim to describe and capture contemporary modes of culture as it has been affected by digital and networked media, such as Castell‘s concept of ―the network society‖ (2001a, 2007) or the notion of the ―knowledge economy‖ (Kahin & Foray, 2006) often implicate and involve contemporary universities, somehow or other. As Terranova (2004) explains: ―the term ‗digital economy‘ as a term seems to describe a formation which intersects on the one hand with the postmodern cultural economy (the media, the university, and the arts) and on the other hand with the information industry (the information and communication complex)‖ (pp. 75-76). Where there are discussions about social, economic

2 and cultural changes that involve the internet and digital media, there is as well the spectre of university involvement. This reflexive but only loosely meditated connection of these two phenomena is obvious: universities, from the beginning have fed internet culture, participating in the very birth of what is now the ubiquitous internet. Not only is what they produce - information, culture and knowledge - part of what is found on the internet, but the technological development of applications that fuels its advancement occurs in part in universities as well.

The intersection of these two arenas: digital internet culture and the culture of contemporary universities lead me to consider an interesting question: what is the character of internet based projects that are being developed in academic environments? Are they subversive and resistant? Are they subsumed by the structure of corporatization and managerialism growing in the academy? Are they symptoms of it? What are their effects on the larger higher education arena as well as to the individual institutions in which they are developed? How do they bear on the notion of academic work and what do they reflect in terms of contemporary higher and post- secondary education? Thus, instead of looking at the how universities are involved in the production and elaboration of larger internet cultures, I am interested in theorizing a small piece of the Internet, what I call digital academic space.

1.1 Towards a definition of „digital academic space‟

The concept of digital academic space refers to internet based digital artefacts that are produced by members of universities and academic communities, and relate in some way to their academic social worlds, generally, to the work that they are doing, or to their institution. This being said, digital academic space is as variable as the situation of the contemporary university which is to say that many types of artefacts live within it. My use of the concept of ‗space‘ to construct the metaphor of digital academic space is purposive and intentional. Why space? As the British Geographer Doreen Massey (2005), one of the first to show how spaces are gendered, explains:

Space is open. Space can never be that completed simultaneity in which all connections have been established in which everywhere is linked to everywhere else. A space, then, which is neither a container for always-already constituted identities nor a completed

closure of holism. This is a space of loose ends and missing links. For the future to be open, space must be open too. (pp. 11-12)

Digital academic space is inhabited by students, which is itself a complex and diverse academic group, as well as staff members and administrators, researchers, fellows, tenured and non tenured professors, adjuncts and the many more ―hidden academics‖ (Rajagopal, 2002) that may not immediately come to mind when imagining the university. It is also composed of cross collaborations and inter and intra-institutional initiatives and artefacts, as well as those organizations which are intermediary and play a supportive role in academic work. What lives online in digital academic space is a continuation and extension of the academic work and lives of the members of university communities, as well as representations of the institutions and organizations, networks and agencies aimed at connecting and proliferating academic work, an important aspect of contemporary academic environments. In more concrete terms, digital academic space is composed of, for example, institutional websites, containing the information necessary for university members (and potential members) to navigate through academic life, mixed with web-based objects created to market university services (contributing to its public face), curricula, learning and learning evaluation objects, as well as web sites and repositories that contain research, or information about research (meta-data). It also contains, of course, e- books and online digital journals some of which are Open Access (free to read), and some of which are owned by academic publishers, as well as faculty and student weblogs. Digital academic space also includes digital software applications that were built within the university, many of which are open source (free to use, re-use and download). The software applications help academics, be they researchers or faculty members, with their work and its dissemination as well as furthering their social and academic commitments, which in some cases cannot be separated.

With this preliminary conception of digital academic space, in this research project I aim to understand more about digital academic space, from the level of embodiment (who does the work by building the applications that help it proliferate) through to its symbolic and discursive manifestations. Since it is composed of many different digitally mediated phenomena, I have chosen to look closely at one specific instance of digital academic space. This is a qualitative research project that employs the methodology situational analysis (Clarke, 2005) to theorize the

4 development and dissemination of a Canadian academic open source software application. The software application, entitled the Open Journal System (OJS) (pkp.sfu.ca/ojs) is a content management system that facilitates the production of open access electronic journals. It is one facet of the larger Public Knowledge Project (PKP) that is housed at the Simon Fraser University library in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It is the foundational element in what is now, in 2010, an important international online academic community since universities and post- secondary institutions all around the world are using the OJS to publish and disseminate their academic knowledge. This study of the OJS reveals some important issues about the characteristics and conditions of digital academic space including who participates in it and how, and about the dynamics of participation. The goal of this situational analysis of the OJS is to theorize, analyze, and provide empirical evidence about the constitution of digital academic space within the sphere of higher education. To this end, the study involves an oral history of the OJS, discussions with the main developers/producers of the OJS software application, email interviews with thirty three of the OJS users (who are also, in some sense producers of the software and of the knowledge the software disseminates) distributed at post-secondary institutions around the world, as well analyses of the OJS documentation, online discussions about OJS between users and developers, and OJS journals.

1.1.1 Foundations of digital academic space: Open source software and Open access movements

An important element of this research study revolves around the concept of digitally mediated open culture which is a part of digital academic space. Digitally mediated open culture refers to the act of releasing, sharing and exchanging different forms of information and knowledge online. This cultural phenomenon, which is becoming increasingly prevalent and important to all spheres of life, has other monikers. Some refer to it as ―free cooperation‖ (Lovink & Scholz, 2007), others to ―peer production‖ (Benkler, 2006), and still others to ―free culture‖ (Lessig, 2004). Along the lines of digitally media open culture is also the idea of ―open science‖ (Paul A. David, 1998) in which knowledge producing institutions have moved away from the secrecy related to previous forms of science to recognize the benefits of ―rapid disclosure and wider dissemination‖ (p.16) and encourage the development of conventions to enable this, and ―participatory media culture‖ (Deuze, 2007) in which Internet users create or at least collaborate

5 on the creation of content and software applications of the Internet. Digitally mediated open culture is linked to all of the above, but in this definition consists of three important web based phenomena: 1- open source software, 2- the Open Access movement, and 3- the Creative Commons, a web based movement which provides the authors of online content (be they writers, illustrators, designers or photographers) with open licenses to protect the open distribution of their work and retain their ownership over it while also releasing it for distribution (creativecommons.org/)(Carroll, 2007; Lessig, 2001). It is the former two movements, open source software development and the Open Access movement, I believe, that are important to digital academic space as they form its underlying technical and social foundation.

Before continuing, I should mention here the multiple, longstanding and somewhat contested theoretical roots of the idea of openness. The idea of openness has been defined and explored by a wide range of theorists and philosophers, from defenders of liberal democracies and open societies such as the French sociologist Henri Bergson and the exiled Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, to semioticians like Ludwig Wittgenstein. For an interesting discussion on the conception of the open society according to both Bergson and Popper and as it resonates within political science see Vernon‘s essay entitled ―The Great Society‖ and ―the Open Society‖: Liberalism in Hayek and Popper‖ (1976). For a philosophical history of the concept of openness and how the concept may be applied to understanding contemporary cultural conflicts please see Rapport‘s Democracy, science and the "open society": a European legacy? (Rapport, 2005). Peter‘s introductory essay on the history of open education (Peters & Britez, 2008) describes openness in post-structural thinking. These theoretical, philosophical and political legacies contribute to the phenomenon of open source software and are part of what it such an interesting phenomenon.

Open source software is defined as software that is released for free onto the Internet under an intellectual property license called the General Public License (GPL) that guarantees its freedom in perpetuity (Paul A. David, Waterman, & Arora, 2003; Lerner & Tirole, 2001, 2002). The Open Source Initiative (www.opensource.org/), a web based organization, provides a standard definition of open source software along with a variety of licenses that may be applied by developers to maintain the openness of their applications, thus positioning them as public or collective works (O'Mahony, 2003). Open source software enables users – hypothetically

6 anybody that can be online, but in reality anyone who knows how to code - to download an open source software application without having to pay or be concerned about ownership, licensing regulations and fees. It also, more importantly, means that users have access to the code of the application, and are thus able to modify and re-develop the software without concern for intellectual property issues, enabling users to become developers or producers, demonstrating how the internet can affect the traditional dynamic of production and consumption (Castells, 2001a). Open source software users may, furthermore, forward their modified applications to other users, who in turn may make their own changes and modifications. Open source software, also known as Free/Libre software (FL/OSS) creates a network or chain of software development, and is considered revolutionary by some (DiBona, Ockman, & Stone, 1999; DiBona, Stone, & Cooper, 2006) and these applications are developed in a wide range of institutional and organizational contexts. To date, the most iconic open source application, the operating system Linux, began as the master‘s thesis project of Linus Torvalds, and in fact, many open source software applications were born within university environments, particularly in the early years of the Internet (Nissenbaum & Price, 2004). As Kidd (2003) describes open source software developers who were ―scientists and graduate students within university research centers‖ (56) represent one of the earliest forms of what is referred to as ―cyber-activism‖ which helped challenge the ―corporate enclosures ...[and] keep the open architecture and free flow of information‖ (57) on the web. As a specific example of the persistent relationship between universities and open source software there is the case of the University of California at Berkley which, having always been involved in fostering the production of open source software projects, created its own open source software license entitled the Berkley Software Distribution (BSD) (McKusik, 1999).

Open source software is often discussed in tandem with the digital networked phenomenon referred to as Open Access. However, where open source software is about guaranteeing free access to the source code of software applications (viewing software code as a form of knowledge), Open Access is about free access to digital literature that is located online. Peter Suber, an American professor of philosophy at Earlham University and Open Access advocate, is active in the movement to mandate open access on the legal and cultural levels (i.e. rallying congress to create legal channels for open access as well as asking writers and researchers to adopt the conventions of providing open access to their work), and promote it within universities.

According to Suber, who edits and distributes a monthly newsletter and blog with Open Access news and developments, Open Access is defined as ―literature [that is] digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions‖ (Suber, 2007). He is careful about emphasizing that Open Access is less about cost, (that is giving something away for free) and more about removing access barriers to academic literature and information. The idea is that academic and scientific research, particularly information developed at universities, should be accessible to everyone because of how it is funded, as well as how it operates within the culture of the scholarly world. As Suber explains further:

The campaign for Open Access focuses on literature that authors give to the world

without expectation of payment. Let me call this royalty-free literature. The most

important royalty-free literature for our purposes is the body of peer-reviewed scientific

and scholarly research articles and their preprints. Scholars write journal articles because

advancing knowledge in their fields advances their careers. They write for impact, not for

money. It takes nothing away from a disinterested desire to advance knowledge to note

that it is accompanied by a strong self-interest in career-building. Because scholars do not

earn money from their journal articles, they are very differently situated from most

musicians and movie-makers. Controversies about providing OA to music, movies, and

other royalty-producing content, therefore, do not carry over to this unique body of

content. (Suber, 2007)

Thus Open Access refers largely to open access to scholarly and scientific information that can on the internet because of how information technologies facilitate reproduction and information dissemination. Since 2001, following the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), a declaration with over 5000 signatories (Chan et al., 2001) that aims to support the development and dissemination of Open Access through funding initiatives and strategic collaboration, Open Access has developed into a global social movement. In addition to the BOAI of 2001, there have been many other public declarations of support for the uptake of Open Access principles

8 within universities such as the Berlin Declaration which encourages German higher education institutions to ‗go OA‘ (Wirsing, 2003), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access (2003), as well as those that are highly technical- the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) which has created meta- data standards that facilitate interoperability (www.openarchives.org/).

There are two main ways of carrying out open access. The first is via the use of institutional repositories in which scholars and researchers may upload pre-prints of their research into a large searchable database provided by the university. The second is via open access peer reviewed journals in which academic journals do not require a subscription for access (Bains, 2009; S. Harnad et al., 2008; Stevan Harnad et al., 2004; Willinsky, 2006). The open source software movement and the Open Access movement are two very different digitally mediated phenomena. They do, however function ―synergistically‖ (Willinsky, 2005) because they work, though in different ways, to maintain openness, public-ness and freedom on the Internet. I discuss the theoretical and conceptual importance of both Open Access and open source software, particularly in relation to current ideas about ―free cooperation‖ (Lovink & Scholz, 2007) and emerging (and shifting) online political economies (Berry & Moss, 2006) in greater detail in the next chapter of this study. I raise them here in order to support the assertion that both open source software and Open Access, both of which are digitally mediated open movements, play a large role within the composition of digital academic space. Many (though not all) of the projects and artifacts that reside in digital academic space are products of either or both of these movements, and moreover, there is something distinctly academic about them. In the case of open source software, it is its intellectual roots, and of course for Open Access, it is its very purpose. Both the open source software movement and the Open Access movement are very meaningful in terms of understanding more about digital academic space.

1.1.2 Open academic publishing via the Open Journal System (OJS)

Considering the importance of open source and Open Access to my vision of digital academic space (they form a large part of it), a pre-requisite for my research study was to include, somehow, these two movements. This is how I arrived at the Open Journal System. The Open Journal System (OJS) is an open source software application developed at a university that facilitates the creation of open access peer reviewed journals. The OJS project began at the

University of British Columbia in 1998 as a simple static web site- a clearinghouse called the Education Exchange (EdEx) - that linked to academic, journalistic, and policy oriented electronic documents, largely around the theme of education, that lived on the Internet. The web site was conceived initially as an experiment by an education professor, Dr. John Willinsky, who was interested in learning more about how to use the Internet to bring academic social science research, which in Canada is funded largely in a public fashion, to the public. In 2000, the direction of the project transformed from that of a clearinghouse/web site, to a content management system called the Open Journal System (OJS), geared towards publishing academic peer reviewed journals, which represented a different way of bringing research to the public. This direction aimed to empower researchers to publish their own journals as a way to distribute their research while preserving the integrity of the academic tradition of peer review. As the development of the OJS progressed, Willinsky, informed by his student developers, adopted the General Public License (GPL), the standard open source intellectual property license, for the system. As an open source software system, the OJS was free for anyone to download, use and redevelop. As an open source system that facilitated open access publications, the OJS soon became a potent tool for open access advocacy, and Willinsky secured awards and grants to help fund its development. In 2005, Willinsky, still a professor at the UBC, partnered with the Simon Fraser University library and the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing to continue the development of the software, as well as to offer services to help academics all around the world implement the software within their own institutions.

Figure 1. Screenshot of a Canadian OJS journal.

The OJS is now one part of a the larger Public Knowledge Project (PKP), which is comprised of several open source software applications that all relate to open publishing, including an application that manages information for academic conferences, and several indexing and meta- data applications in order to enable OJS journals to integrate within larger databases so that articles and essays are searchable. An open book publishing application is currently under development, and several research projects about the impact of the open access movement and the OJS software are underway under the umbrella of the PKP. In 2007, at the time that this research was conducted, the OJS was being used to produce one thousand journals. According to statistics gather by researchers in 2009 from the PKP, the OJS is now used by four thousand journal producers (Edsig, 2009). The OJS has also been adopted by academic institutions all over the world, with a significant presence in South America and a relatively significant presence in Africa (pkp.sfu.ca/ojs-geog). The system has been translated into over 30 languages with many of these translations donated by users. Following the release of version 2.0 of the system, in which its design was overhauled, the SFU library/PKP project held a conference at which users

11 were invited to present their journals, describe their experiences of using the system, learn more about using the system to its fullest capacity, and learn how to contribute code and modifications. Users- some of who were fully subsidized- from all over the world were in attendance. The PKP project held a second conference in the summer of 2009. All of its conference presentations were streamed onto the PKP web site, and conference attendees‘ blogged their thoughts about the presentations.

Figure 2. Screenshot of the Public Knowledge Project web site.

The OJS is an interesting phenomenon; it is not quite an academic research project- although it has inspired much academic research (this thesis being just one example, for another see Piyati‘s (2007) thesis project on critical theory of library technology) and it is not quite a community based activity as compared to service learning initiatives where university students and faculty members work with members of the community, although there is community involvement in the project. With this research study, I have the goal of teasing out the meaning of the OJS,

12 particularly the dynamics of its production and its distribution, as it relates to the contemporary arena of higher education keeping the concepts of mediated social relations at the forefront of the study. One reason for the importance of this study, in which I look empirically at the meso-level, has to do with the portrayal of universities‘ relationship to information technology over the past decade. Far from being innovative, the case has been made that the Internet has brought increased corporatism and commercialism into the university environment (Levidow, 2002). Writing in 2005, for example, the Internet theorist Geert Lovink was critical of how universities were involved in the Internet. As he asserts:

So far, the educational sector has been slow in terms of adapting network technologies.

Institutional infighting between existing disciplines has prevented higher education to

become truly innovative. Universities worldwide are in the iron grip of Microsoft. The

use of free and open source software is marginal, if not straight-out forbidden. Whereas

academia played a key role in the development of the Internet, it lost ground over the

years and is now desperately trying to catch up with a computer games course here or

there. (2005)

Based on Lovink‘s critique, one question is whether, in 2010, universities have ―caught up‖ by envisioning new, more creative possibilities – perhaps beyond courseware platforms and delivering e-learning solutions- regarding their involvement the Internet. Lovink‘s statement is particularly interesting for my purpose because of his reference to open source software, and how this digitally networked phenomenon links universities to the early Internet in a way that is progressive and positive. This connects to my research study, more specifically my selection of the open source OJS as the subject of the study. The condition of being open source situates the OJS within conversations about freedom and power both online and within the embodied world. As evidence of this, open source software is referred to in the following ―subversive‖ (Raymond, 1999, 2001, 2005), as a ―revolution‖ (Moody, 2001b) and open source software developers are ―hackers‖ and ―heroes‖ (Levy, 1984). These applications are important legacies within the development of the Internet as well as within the history of the contemporary university. That being said, what are the conditions for their growth and proliferation?

While open source software is often hailed as subversive and revolutionary there are some very important traditional and conservative dynamics at play within the movement. As an example, open source is a gendered phenomenon. As researchers have shown most open source software developers are, consistently men between the ages 20 and 35 (P.A. David & Shapiro, 2008). Furthermore, the movement‘s central figures, who I discuss below, are male: Eric Raymond, Richard Stallman and Linus Torlvalds, to name a few. Even the most well known theorists of the phenomenon of open source - Steven Weber (2004), Yoachai Benkler (2006), Manuel Castells (2001a), Douglas Rushkoff (2003) - are male. There is no question about it: open source software is a male phenomenon, in so many different ways. Considering this, what do open source software projects that are developed within universities look like? How does the situation of the university manifest in the replication of this gender element? Is this movement gendered male because it began in the academy? Do its ‗male dynamics‘ continue within the academic situation or do they change? Do these projects reintroduce problematic gender dynamics into the university environments thereby undercutting progressive gender policies?

The open source aspect of the study also contributes a global element to this research project both in an embodied and discursive way. That is, it provides a way to capture and analyze what I refer to as academic globalization which I see as interaction and collaboration between academic institutions dispersed world-wide that are largely digitally mediated but might also result in embodied social relations such as a conference. This is because the lack of cost of open source software applications enables users distributed around the world to download and use them without any risks of loss, thus increasing the amount of potential users and strengthening the network. The freedom of open source software imparts unrestricted and unfettered conditions to the software, so that users do not to worry about rights, fees and regulation. This means in turn that, hypothetically, users located in any type of scenario have access to the software as long as they have consistent access to the Internet. This is why open source software development is said to occur in a distributed way, as users that are often dispersed may collaborate with one another to solve problems and fix bugs. The freedom of open source software transforms these projects into global projects and so studying an academic open source software project is a way of studying globalization in the university.

Yet, while this may sound ideal, it does raise important questions about the underbelly of digitally mediated open culture of which open source software and the Open Access movement are a part; this underbelly is well-articulated by Terranova in her description of the characteristics of network culture. As she notes: ―the design of the Internet (and its technical protocols) prefigured the constitution of a neo-imperial electronic space, whose main feature is an openness which is also a constitutive tendency to expansion‖ (Tiziana Terranova, 2004). The question is then, is the open culture that plays a large part in the constitution of digital academic space ―open‖ in the sense that it is participatory and inclusive the Internet? How might it support expansionism and – possibly- the extension of a regressive colonial past? In this research project, my aim is to explore some of these questions.

1.2 From ivory tower to the babbling bazaar: Sophisticated discourses of open source software

1.2.1 “Raymondism”

Open source software is an interesting phenomenon not only because of the technological freedom it affords its users and producers, but also because of the unique culture and discourse that has arisen around it. Early proponents of open source software have proven to be prolific writers and theorists such that open source software is now linked to multiple sophisticated debates and conversations, not only about software development, but also about the nature of freedom and modes of economic production in societies wherein the Internet has become an important medium. Eric Raymond, a software programmer and proponent of open source software development, write what has become an iconic essay entitled ―The Cathedral and the Bazaar‖ in which he lays out, in aphorisms, the reasons why open source software development works better than proprietary software development. As Raymond posits, whereas proprietary software development occurs in cathedral type organizations where there is an organized hierarchical division of labour between developers who often work alone, open source software development takes place in a disorganized fashion more akin to a ―babbling bazaar‖, where developers take up projects out of interest -to ―scratch an itch‖, and problems are solved based on the input of other users and software developers -―given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow‖ (Raymond, 2005). Raymond‘s observations regarding the characteristics of open source

15 software programming come from his analysis of the Linux operating system, which, as Moody recounts (Moody, 2001a, 2001b) was remade from the Unix operating system with the worldwide help of other software developers, as well as from his own experience of creating a software application called Fetchmail used for a long time by a number of email applications and was also made out of another earlier software application. Raymond‘s argument is as follows:

Here, I think, is the core difference underlying the cathedral-builder and bazaar styles. In

the cathedral-builder view of programming, bugs and development problems are tricky,

insidious, deep phenomena. It takes months of scrutiny by a dedicated few to develop

confidence that you've winkled them all out. Thus the long release intervals, and the

inevitable disappointment when long-awaited releases are not perfect. In the bazaar view,

on the other hand, you assume that bugs are generally shallow phenomena - or, at least,

that they turn shallow pretty quick when exposed to a thousand eager co-developers

pounding on every single new release. Accordingly you release often in order to get more

corrections, and as a beneficial side effect you have less to lose if an occasional botch

gets out the door. (Raymond, 2005)

Raymond‘s aim in his Cathedral/Bazaar essay is to outline the most productive, creative and efficient way of creating software, as well as to theorize what he sees as an interesting social process behind two very successful software projects. While his conclusion is that open source development- the bazaar model- functions better than closed source software development, he also believes that this is a revolutionary phenomenon which is why he opens his essay with the statement that ―Linux is subversive‖. Raymond is careful to separate his point, which is about a mode of production, away from a moral message about capitalism, openness and freedom. As he states further: ―Perhaps in the end the open-source culture will triumph not because cooperation is morally right or software "hoarding" is morally wrong (assuming you believe the latter, which neither Linus nor I do), but simply because the commercial world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem.‖ What is interesting about Raymond‘s essay is not only his message about open

16 source software development, but as well, how the essay points to a group of individuals (men) who are highly articulate and analytical about the functioning and merits of open source software. This is what makes open source software such an interesting social phenomenon, particularly, as I shall show in this thesis, as open source software developers adopt the discourses of the movement as they participate in their projects and how these discourses function in the arena of digital academic work.

What is also interesting is Raymond‘s use of metaphors which are militaristic, positing the idea that the dispute about open source versus proprietary software is akin to a war which to me recalls Terranova‘s suggestion that the Internet is both open and expansionist. Following the publication of ―The Cathedral and the Bazaar‖ in 1998, the Netscape Communicator browser went open source, and Raymond presented his theories about software development conferences around the world. He then, with his colleague Bruce Perens, founded the Open Source Initiative (www.opensource.org), which is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting open source software development. Software developers who wish to release their applications open source can pull the appropriate intellectual property license off of the OSI web site as they are accessible for anyone to use.

1.2.2 Free as in Libre: „Stallmanism‟

While Raymond‘s characterization of open source software was about encouraging transparency as opposed to spreading a moral message, other proponents of open source software were interested in preserving the freedom associated with open source. Perhaps the greatest advocate of this aspect of open source is Richard Stallman. Stallman, a former MIT ‗hacker‘ (software developer) in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, wrote the most widely used open source/free software intellectual property license, entitled the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), coined the term Copyleft to describe licensing schemes that do not restrict reproduction and adaption of works, and in 1985 developed the open source operating system GNU‘s Not Unix (GNU) (Williams, 2002). Most importantly, and in contrast to Eric Raymond, Linus Torvalds, and other members of the OSI, Stallman is a staunch (some would say stubborn) advocate of free software where free refers to the ideas and values of freedom (―free as in Libre, not as in beer‖).

In 1985, Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation (http://www.fsf.org/), which advocates for free software as a human right, not simply a software development process, and contends that proprietary software is a danger to society. As the FSF web site, for which Stallman is currently president, explains:

To use free software is to make a political and ethical choice asserting the right to learn,

and share what we learn with others. Free software has become the foundation of a

learning society where we share our knowledge in a way that others can build upon and

enjoy. Currently, many people use proprietary software that denies users these freedoms

and benefits. If we make a copy and give it to a friend, if we try to figure out how the

program works, if we put a copy on more than one of our own computers in our own

home, we could be caught and fined or put in jail. That‘s what‘s in the fine print of the

license agreement you accept when using proprietary software. The corporations behind

proprietary software will often spy on your activities and restrict you from sharing with

others. And because our computers control much of our personal information and daily

activities, proprietary software represents an unacceptable danger to a free society.

Stallman‘s version of free software is anti-proprietary and anti-commercial in the sense that he stands against restricting or limiting access to the software as well as behind the software. Part of this is related to the idea that software is, in its very essence, knowledge, which from an academic point of view works best when it is shared. The goal of free software is not to create a product per se, but to develop knowledge. In this way it is analogous to academic science. Stallman, on behalf of the Free Software Foundation, travels the world advocating in favour of free software. As the FSF web site indicates, he presents at conferences, and works with national governments and international organization on the development, implementation and adoption of free software. Ultimately, free software for Richard Stallman is an ethical issue.

Much has been written about both Stallman and Raymond, who were once close friends and collaborators, and the differences between open source and free software. Bradley, for example,

18 teases out the different strands of ―anarchy and utopianism‖ in Raymond and Stallman‘s ideas, comparing the OSI to the FSF, reaching the conclusion that while somewhat different Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS):

Is therefore as much about anarcho-utopianism as it is about programming, because what marks FLOSS as different from traditional software development is not a new technical practice - coding languages remain largely unchanged – but a new social practice of software production, distribution, and use. The political inspired discourse that weaves its way through non-technical discussions surrounding FLOSS is replete with anarcho- utopian incantations. (2005b, p. 588)

This is what is fascinating about open source software: the discursive legacies and constructions relating to the movement. The purposes of describing these ideas here however is to show how advanced these phenomena are on the discursive level. Re-telling the story of the ―Cathedral and the Bazaar‖ metaphor which is, as Poynder asserts on his blog ―Open and Shut‖ (2006), ―the dominant narrative of the Open Source Movement‖ gives context to the assertion that the open source condition of the OJS software situates this research study within a conversation about freedom and power as these two fluid and dynamic values relate to the Internet and cyberspace. This brief history also underscores an important condition of open source/free software that is important to this research project: the strong link of open source and free software to the academy: not only does this movement trace its origins back to university laboratories, but the spirit of transparency, collaboration and peer review that these projects seem to embrace mimic the processes of academic knowledge creation. Thus there is significant meaning behind choosing to study an open source software project to get closer to understanding more about digital academic space.

1.2.3 Academic open source software projects

In addition to the meaningfulness of choosing open source software development as the object of study in this project, it is also important to make clear that these projects are representative in digital academic space. That is, just as there are private, corporatized and proprietary digital artifacts in digital academic space, so are there many open source software projects being

19 developed in universities. This is another reason why they are important to analyze. Having originated within the walls of the ―ivory tower‖, many universities are now developing their own open source software projects. Some very well known examples of these projects include: the MIT‘s D-space (www.dspace.org/), which is a software application that facilitates the creation of institutional repositories, or large data bases used by academic institutions to store research and pre-prints; the content management system Moodle (moodle.org), which, incidentally, also began as part of a graduate thesis of a doctoral student at Curtin University of Technology in Australia, and is used as a learning management system by thousands of universities around the world; the Sakai collaboration and learning environment (CLE), which involves 150 member institutions in its development(sakaiproject.org); and the University of Toronto‘s e-Presence software (epresence.tv/), a web casting application that also archives the video (which may also be used with Moodle). The MIT‘s OpenCourseWare project (MIT.OCW.edu) is an open source/open access project which provides unfettered access to MIT course syllabi via its searchable web site. The project, which began in 2002, has now been spun off to include localized versions in a number of different countries and regions. These include, for example, GRASS, which is a geographic information system GRASS (grass.itc.it/), is an open source application that began in 1982 as a collaboration between private companies, federal agencies (including the military), and universities to capture geographic information. Not only is the application itself shared and continuously developed within these various institutional settings, but so is its content.

Academic open source software projects are developed in a number of different scenarios. The above mentioned are larger scale-able systems that are relevant to most institutions- all universities and colleges, as an example, at this point, provide some sort of web based materials in their courses, and many universities are looking to develop institutional repositories. Other applications are smaller scale, and might have been developed to facilitate an academic‘s research, and released for free so that it might help other researchers. Similarly, a software developer, employed by a university to develop an application to manage some university related information and data, might have released the application open source to enable someone else to take the reins of the project, and re-develop it. In other words, many academic open source software projects are not developed and marketed centrally, particularly if they serve a niche purpose. Indeed, even those that are larger and well-known, began as modest, small scale, experimental projects.

Despite the fact that there are many academic open source software projects, both large scale and small scale, little is known on the empirical level about these projects, particularly in terms of their effects in the context of higher education. But what are their effects? Scholz, who with Lovink conducts research in the area of digital cooperation, is also interested in the subject. Regarding MIT‘s OpenCourseWare project he argues that: ―MIT reinforces its leadership position and status based on its openness to publish all its syllabi online. The act of gift giving does not cost MIT anything except the operational costs of the site. Openness functions as Public Relations. MIT‘s gift leads to a defeat for other educational communities that cannot reciprocate this generosity. A small college would not benefit from such openness‖ (Scholz, 2006). His statements, which fall in line with Terranova‘s concerns about the expansionist tendencies of the internet, point to the notion that digitally mediated academic projects need to be studied and analyzed, not only in terms of their online constitution but also in connection with their material, physical and historical presence (represented by MITs historical legacy, social status and financial resources). Scholz‘ critique of MIT‘s OCW project resonates particularly in light of the competitive context of universities as it is described by Marginson (2004b).

The challenge with studying open projects is that they tend to be unique, and thus difficult to pin down on the methodological level, as well as to theorize. Since, as Raymond‘s theory posits, the benefit of open source software development is that it is decentralized and distributed over both time and space, studying them possesses some inherent practical problems in terms of securing the information needed to understand the projects. Researching open source software projects that are developed at universities, considering the academic context as a primary element within the projects, presents the opportunity to understand more about what universities are doing in online as well as to use the academic context as a methodological device. The framework of higher education, in this study for example, helped orient the initial questions- what are universities doing online and with Internet, aided in the selection of a project to study – a project developed within universities for a specifically academic purpose, and served as a starting point for data collection- interviewees from within the university that houses the OJS were interviewed for this project and were asked to address issues related to the higher education context in semi- structured interviews.

1.3 Using „situational analysis‟ to theorize digital academic space

This research project is two pronged: its main goal is to understand more about digital academic space, to analyze, theorize and chart an example of a digitally mediated cooperative research project, to understand who is involved in them, how they are involved, and the meaning of this involvement. The second, though admittedly lesser goal is to use the instance of the OJS to understand more about open source software development within the context of academic institutions- that is to understand how the process functions, and to compare common characterizations of these projects to an actual project. With this study I am looking to go beyond the common characterizations of information technology in higher education by assuming a critical epistemological position, as well as to open up new ways of approaching the study of the internet and academia. I am also looking to contribute to the existing research literature of open source software, which up to this point has not yet investigated open source software in the university setting with a consideration for the current issues of contemporary universities.

This study employs Clarke‘s (2005) situational analysis methodology, in which the situation, comprised of collective and individual actors, non-human and human elements, and spatial and temporal elements, is the main unit of analysis. The researcher maps out the social and positional arenas of all of the different elements as a way to understand their dynamics and theorize their meaning. This study is interdisciplinary, framed by ideas and debates occurring in the fields of contemporary higher education and media studies. The data consists of face to face interviews with the main developers of the OJS application, email interviews with OJS users, and supplemental information about the software system that was culled online. Unlike many research projects that look at open source software development, this study is not ethnography. I did not delve deeply into the culture of the open source software programmers to understand their motivations for producing the software application. This is because I wanted this study to have meaning for scholars who study, specifically, contemporary universities; to understand what is produced by the confluence of national institutional structures, steeped historical values and ideals (such as those found in universities), and a networked project composed of both alternative and mainstream academic spaces. I wanted this study to reflect, furthermore, a critical approach to the Internet in higher education, and go beyond prevailing methodological limitations as articulated by Lovink when he states:

The Internet is no longer a marginal phenomenon that has to be studied, and presented,

like an alien tribe. The study of the ‗everyday life‘ of net culture has been useful, but

nowadays seems incapable of providing us with a bigger picture. ...Research into net

cultures entails more than the study of ‗virtual communities‘. It is time to look for

elements that can make up a network theory outside of post-modern cultural studies and

ethnographic social sciences. (pp. 6-7)

Clarke explains that situational analysis examines the ‗meso-level‘ by looking at the situation. It postulates the structural and the loosely dynamic, and seemed fitting, for this reason to theorize the meaning of the OJS.

1.3.1 The structure of this analysis

As a study of an open source software project that theorizes the effects, significance, symbolism and constitution of digital academic space, it is important to note that this is an interdisciplinary research project. This means that it includes ideas, concepts, constructs and histories from different fields. The structure of this thesis reflects this characteristic by including literature from two important fields. The first is the field of higher education, which is itself interdisciplinary, and looks at all of the issues relating to post-secondary and higher education, from, for example, more traditional discussions about tenure and academic freedom, discussions about university missions, funding and resource management, to human capital theory analyses of the value of graduate degrees, to more contemporary ideas and critiques, such as concerns about neo- liberalism and the effects of contemporary forms of globalization on the academy.

The second area of study that is important to this thesis research project has roots in the field of media studies, and relates to discussions about digital open culture which in turn includes the large existing literature about open source software. Open source software, which as I have shown plays a prominent role in this study, has been studied and written about from a variety of perspectives and standpoints. This is why it such a rich and interesting phenomenon to study. Thus in this thesis study I devote a chapter to a review of the existing literature about digital

23 open culture, which includes the literature of open source software as well as the Open Access movement, another important element in this project. The next chapter contains a review of the literature of contemporary higher education. In chapter three, I describe the study‘s analytical and methodological frames, going into more detail about the methodology and process of situational analysis. Here I describe as well the data collection, the research participants and other research elements involved in this study.

1.3.2 Three narratives of digital academic space

The analytical sections of this thesis study are contained in the last three chapters of the thesis. In chapter four, I describe the situation in which the OJS was conceived by providing a brief oral history of the project. Here I make connections between the institutional elements, actors, and agents that are so integral to the structure, development and proliferation of the OJS. I analyze the discursive renderings of the institutions that were involved in the project showing how digitally mediated open projects are increasingly affecting the way academic institutions are perceived which is important considering the value of reputation and prestige in the higher education sector. In this chapter I describe some of the reputational benefits gained by the SFU resulting from involvement with the PKP/OJS project, keeping in mind, Scholz‘ concerns about power imbalances derived from MIT‘s OCW project.

Chapter five follows, to some degree, some of the more conventional literatures of open source software by analyzing the core OJS developers. As opposed to their motivations, a familiar trope in the literature of open source software, I discuss their attitudes towards their institutional situation. The OJS developers identified flexibility and contractual employment as key factors within their employment, as well as their loyalty to the PKP/OJS project, and a commitment to open source software development. The OJS developers, I argue represent an important professional identity and community of practice that reformulates and reflects existing (and regressive) gender dynamics. This chapter explores these issues.

Chapter six considers the PKP/OJS project from the perspective of the users. It describes how users adopted and implemented the system, whether or not they contributed to the software development, and the effects according to their perspectives, of using the system. It argues that

24 based on users who participated in this project, OJS involvement, to a great degree, occurred in a informal manner; that users engaged in and adopted similar discourses as OJS developers; and describes how OJS usage is contributing to global knowledge production and contributing to reformulation of another, possibly problematic, identity: the developing world scholar. In this chapter I describe, analyze and explore the dynamics, effects and consequences of these issues. Finally, each chapter of the chapter of this thesis is begins with a pictorial screen shot of the front page of an OJS online journal as well as a brief description of the journal‘s focus and scope of the journal, as a way to familiarize readers with what the OJS produces.

1.4 Towards a new ideal-type in the academic environment

1.4.1 Outlining the conditions of Digitally Mediated Open Research Projects (DMORP)

The aim of a situational analysis is not to create a large, over arching theory to explain, in this case, the composition of digital academic space, or even larger- how new technologies shape and re-shape culture, a topic that is often taken up by media and technology theorists who are pushed and pulled between the ‗deterministic position‘ and the ‗anti-determinists‘. Instead, to put it plainly, the research goal is to capture, analyze, describe and theorize a number of lesser phenomena from as many perspectives as there are available. This is what the ‗meso‘ level is: it is not the individual and it is not the institution. It is the shared space in between the larger structures, and the independent individual, and actually, discourse is an important component of this level. In a discussion about her methodology, Adele Clarke asks that researchers ―conceptually replace modernist uni-dimensional normal curves with postmodern multidimensional mappings in order to represent lived situations and the variety of positionalities and human and non-human activities and discourses within them.‖ If we do not pursue this, ―we merely continue performing recursive classifications that ignore the empirical world‖ (p. 25). Studying academic open source software development presents myriad opportunities to describe and identify new identities and discourses and their dynamics within the social world of universities and academics.

While I accept the idea that the goal of a situational analysis is not to create a grand theory about the phenomena that are being studied, I also feel compelled to organize these smaller, non- recursive findings in a clear and articulate manner to facilitate future research about issues that might be taken up as a result of this study. As such, I invoke a conceptual tool that has been used within the field of comparative higher education to organize the positions and relations that I found in my research situation. In so doing, I also hope to the turn this tool, the German sociologist Max Weber‘s concept of the ―ideal type‖(M. Weber, 1946), on its head, so to speak, wrenching it away from its ―functionalist‖ roots (Hilbert & Collins, 2001) by under-laying the theory with Clarke‘s meso-level methodology of situational analysis. Studies that attempt to theorize new technologies call for new methodologies. Situational analysis combined with Weber‘s ideal- type concept formation, though dissonant, will facilitate, I hope, something new.

1.5 Characteristics of Digitally Mediated Open Research Projects

In his theory of ideal types, Weber creates a way for researchers of model and classify social phenomena with the caveat that these models and classification schemes are but abstractions of a reality that is too complex to capture with full accuracy. Weber himself used ideal types to understand more about a variety of social phenomenon, from modes of government, the ideal type of socialism, the ideal type of democracy, to modes of bureaucracies, such as different social agencies such as public schools (Winch, 1958). The ideal type that I am attempting to construct, which I have named the Digitally Mediated Open Research Project (DMORP) is abstracted from the OJS project, and serves to summarize some of the points of my analysis. Based on my research of the OJS, there are five conditions that Digitally Mediated Open Research Projects contain. They are as follows:

1- They are open source or open access, or digitally ‗open‘ in some way.

2- Their goal is to disseminate knowledge and research, as opposed to being pedagogical

tools compared to, say, ‗learning objects‘, which is why I am referring to them as

‗research projects‘.

3- They are staffed by ‗information technology professionals‘, a relatively new but re-

constituted community of professionals in the academic environment. These IT

professionals identify with the DMORP in which they work more than with the university

that employs them but place their faith in what they believe are the non-corporate ideals

of the classical university. These professionals are male, and the indeed these projects are

‗gendered male‘- despite the presence and inter-relations of the project with the academic

library, which as an institution and a profession is gendered ‗female‘.

4- These projects are often global but do not begin necessarily with the intention of being

global. They are oriented towards producing ‗global knowledge‘ which is knowledge that

can be used in a variety of cultural milieus, which is adaptable by being, for example,

interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary. DMORPs function as nodes that bring together

institutions from all over the world. This aspect is contingent on it being open and

cooperative.

5- DMORPs are ‗roguish‘. They originate in an unstructured, unplanned fashion, perhaps as

a faculty member‘s research project, off the radar of the university‘s central

administration, and grow from there.

6- As they grow and become more global, they become oriented towards the goal of

development, thus providing another avenue for involving universities in the project of

global development. Indeed, users begin to perceive the value of the DMORP as being

linked to opening up avenues for universities in the global south. This element, I believe,

needs to be ―blue-printed‖ (Scholz, 2006) and analyzed critically.

DMORPs live within the larger container of digital academic space which is itself composed of digitally mediated cultural artefacts of all forms and origins- both open and closed,

27 grassroots and commercial. Indeed, digital academic space is an arena that is both constantly expanding and changing, and is composed of artefacts that are essentially unique. They are unique not only because they are relatively young and un-standardized, but also because the social arenas in which they are created differ vastly. When the layers of culture that frame their creation are taken into consideration - including disciplinary cultures, institutional cultures, national/local/geographic elements which are often integral to both public and private post-secondary institutions, and the personal style of their authors – it becomes apparent how methodologically difficult digital academic space is to study. Outlining the conditions, dynamics and effects of DMORPs, which form a part of the larger, complex and varied arena of digital academic space, is a step towards understanding more about digital academic space.

Figure 3. Screenshot of the OJS journal Health and Human Rights: An International Journal.

“While continuing the journal‟s print-only tradition of critical scholarship, Health and Human Rights, now available as both print and online text, provides an inclusive forum for action-oriented dialogue among human rights practitioners. The journal endeavors to increase access to human rights knowledge in the health field by linking an expanded community of readers and contributors. Following the lead of a growing number of open access publications, the full text of Health and Human Rights is freely available to anyone with internet access.”

From ―About the Journal‖, Health and Human Rights.

Chapter 2: Liquid Networks: The Literature of Open Culture, Open Source Software and the Open Access Movement

In this thesis project, my goal is to theorize the conditions, characteristics, dynamics and effects of an emerging social phenomenon taking place within the arena of universities, beyond their physical campuses, within the larger arena of digital academic space. This social phenomenon,

Digitally Mediated Open Research Projects (DMORPs) play a role within digital academic space, not only enabling university collaboration online by sharing research digitally, but if not pushing, then encouraging them in the direction of networked collaboration. In order to define and critically assess DMORPs on the empirical level, I have undertaken an analysis of one specific project, entitled the Open Journal System (OJS). Prior to presenting the analytical sections of my study which I have divided into three narratives of digital academic space, I review the existant scholarly literature relating to free and open digital culture, in which I include the literature relating to open source software and the Open Access movement. These literatures have provided me with the integral analytical tools and context for my analysis. Open networked culture, open source software and the Open Access movement are meaningful from multiple disciplinary vantage points. As I shall demonstrate open source software is significant to theorists located across a range of diverse fields of study. For an economist, as an example, it might turn the classical model of supply and demand on its head, while for a political scientist it might facilitate new forms of dissent. As this is so, open source software which is a part of networked open culture, is meaningful to theorists of higher education. In this literature, I review and describe this rich multi-disciplinary literature. I begin by examining existing analyses of

30 web-based free and open culture, continue by providing some scholarly examples of how open source software has been researched from various vantage points, and conclude with a presentation and discussion of some of the literature surrounding the Open Access movement.

2.1 Is a participatory commons reliant on free labour? The literature of free and open culture

Open source software and open access are manifestations of free and open culture. As a result, I begin by describing the literature that examines free and open culture in order to describe, not only what exactly it is composed of, but as well the significance of its current manifestation

(since it has existed in various forms prior to the Internet) which is contingent on digital networks. For my purpose here free and open culture is defined as web-based digital objects and artifacts, including software applications, developed in an array of different contexts, for a variety of reasons (i.e. commercial and non-commercial), that are released for free on the

Internet. The legal scholar Lawrence Lessig, mentioned briefly in my introduction, is a pioneer and main figure in the promotion of free culture on the web. Free culture is important because, as he writes:

[it] supports and protects its creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting

intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights

to guarantee that follow on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the

control of the past, to guarantee that follow on creators remain as free as possible from

the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property just as a free

market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a

permission culture – a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of

the powerful or of creators from the past. (2004, p. xiv)

Lessig‘s work in developing the ability to create and maintain free culture has lead to the widely used ―Creative Commons‖ license as well as to a variety of other intellectual property schemes that protect the freedom of digital objects, largely from commercialization, and promote the process of digital sharing and collaboration that is facilitated by the Internet. However this conception of free and open culture, as something that needs to be protected from commercial privatization via intellectual property licenses, is limited. Indeed, Berry and Moss (2006) argue in favour of a more politicized definition. For them free and open culture needs to be more closely aligned with the realization of a more radical democracy. As they state:

Through copyright the Creative Commons attempts to construct a commons within the

realm of private ownership. The result is not, dare we say it, a commons at all. The

commons are formed through commonalty and common rights, resistant to any

mechanisms of privatization, whether those of the Creative Commons or not. Without

commonalty, without the common substrate through which singularities act, live and

relate, there could be no commons at all.

Thus an accurate picture of free and open culture goes beyond its conception as web-based digital artefacts that are protected by specific copyright agreements that guarantee their freedom.

While Lessig‘s version hinges around the legal regimes of maintaining these forms of culture, he also cites the participatory possibilities enabled by the Internet, its ability to ―diversify‖ potential

―culture creators‖ as the main reason why free culture needs to be protected (p. 9), though Berry and Moss decry the notion that the logical outcome of this is greater social equality. This latter

32 aspect, the diversity of creators in free and open culture, is essential to the discussions of free and open culture.

A full understanding of free and open culture goes beyond the protection of digital objects from commercial interest via specially designed intellectual property agreements, although admittedly this plays an important role in it. But not all free and open culture is protected; some of it exists, outside of those protected boundaries particularly as it becomes more prevalent in what is referred to as ―web 2.0‖ culture (O'Reilly, 2006). Simply stated, not all authors wish or bother to assign a copyright scheme to their work, and in the same vein not every work needs to be protected; though unprotected they are still part of open and free culture. Critical internet theorists analyze the dynamics of free and open culture and are careful to move beyond the hyperbole of what digital network technologies might enable in idealized circumstances, to more grounded analyses of their effects. For example, writing from the perspective of an economist,

Yochai Benkler (2006) explains how peer production (of digital objects, applications, and documents) is an off shoot of free and open culture as it relies on the ability to collaborate online in an unrestricted fashion is changing the balance of power in society – a similar argument to

Lessig‘s above. After describing the drawbacks of the mainstream media, arguing that it is essentially too powerful and controlling, Benkler explains that ―the networked public sphere‖

(which is composed of free and open culture) ―enables more individuals to communicate their observations and their viewpoints to many others, and to do so in a way that cannot be controlled by media owners and is not as easily corruptible by money as were the mass media‖ (p. 11).

Thus free and open culture, which facilitates peer production is a more vital networked public sphere, enables greater public participation and debate, and could result in a society in which

―individuals are less passive‖ (p. 11).

While this is potentially so, there are others who examine the flipside of this engagement. The

Internet theorist Tiziana Terranova, for example, writes about the nature of free labour that is becoming, increasingly present in digital economies particularly as free and open culture becomes increasingly predominant. ―Free labour‖, she states, ―is a trait of the cultural economy at large and an important yet undervalued force in advanced capitalist societies‖ (2000, p. 33).

The need for free labour grows as participatory web based digital culture grows, and thus free labour has become an important offshoot of free and open culture. In a similar vein, the sociologist Mark Deuze writes about what he calls ―liquid life‖ in which the boundaries between work and leisure, consumption, production and collaboration are all blurred. As he explains:

The liquefaction of the cultures of production and consumption undermines a major

structure of the social division of labour between firms and industries on the one hand,

and consumers on the other. Yet it also opens up all kinds of ways for commercial

organizations to harness the voluntary work performed by atomized and therefore

powerless individual customers. This is a powerful dynamic in the contemporary cultural

economy, greatly enabled and amplified by the affordability of new information and

communication technologies, by liquid life increasingly lived in and through media, and

by the need for capitalist markets to expand and differentiate products continually,

keeping all of us on our feet as perpetual customers and collaborators. (2007, p. 49)

Free labour, volunteerism, and Deuze‘s notion of liquefication all capture an aspect of free and open culture that is not represented in depictions of peer to peer collaboration, the networked commons, and participatory culture. The literature of open and free culture consists of laudatory theorizations of its potentials and possibilities as we see in Lessig and Benkler‘s ideas, as well as more critical analyses that examine its dynamics and effects, as per Deuze‘s and Terranova‘s

34 analyses. These two poles relate to the fact that the type of free and open culture that I am discussing here is digitally mediated and networked, characteristics which enable a type of access, collaboration, exchangeability and participation, which we see for example in open source software development, exemplified in the development of the OJS, that is different from other forms of free and open culture.

2.1.1 Open but hierarchical: Examining the character of networked collaboration

The dynamics of collaboration in the development of open and free culture is a major issue amongst theorists who are trying to understand both the potential and the reality of open networked culture. As such this theme inhabits an important part of the literature on open and free culture. In his essay ―The Participatory Challenge‖ Trebor Scholtz (2006) describes and discusses the character of contemporary forms of collaboration, and ―cooperative technologies‖.

As he explains:

Today, people do not merely browse the web. Instead they give away information,

expertise, and advice without monetary compensation. They submit texts, code, music,

images, and video files in settings that allow for such contributions. They also re-mix

each other‘s content. Thousands voluntarily participate in open encyclopedias, social

bookmarking sites, friend-of-a-friend networks, media art projects and blogs or wikis.

This exemplifies the growing interest in technologies of cooperation. (para. 1)

This online cooperation is engendered as a result of the cultural norms and conventions of free and open culture. Advocating in favour of what he refers to as ―extreme sharing networks‖,

Scholz describes many of the collaborative initiatives that are taking place online, how they are

35 successful (or not), and how they are affecting social relations. As he states that ―the actuality of a network is determined by the extent to which it is able to inspire. Rarely can traditional cultural institutions afford to work about one topic for an entire year. This is possible in an extreme sharing network.‖ Scholz sees a distinction between networked cultural production and culture that comes from traditional institutions. It is this schism that is interesting in relation to my study of the OJS for the question is what happens when traditional institutions – universities -become more networked? As he continues:

Much of the intellectual labour produced in universities is locked away in expensive

books or journals published by academic presses. Collaborative knowledge pools include

Connexions, CiteULike, MIT Open Course Ware, H2O and Share Widely. These tools

challenge the romantic ideal of the individual thinker who keeps her findings close to her

chest. To research collaboratively saves time and resources and improves teaching. It also

aims to avoid the reinvention of the wheel. Expectations are quantified by ever-larger

amounts of knowledge being moved into the commons out of fortified enclosures (i.e.

password protected journals or syllabi). (para. 10)

Open culture and networked collaboration within the realm of the academic could be part of a progressive direction for universities. The ethic of collaboration that is present in free and open culture may have the effect of challenging the existing process of academic and scientific knowledge production. At the same time, Scholz is cautious to recognize the difference between networked cooperation, collaboration and participation and the total removal of barriers via open culture. While he praises open publishing and open access, for example, he also expresses concern about the alternate effects of MIT‘s OpenCourseWare project. He states:

Openness functions as Public Relations. MIT‘s gift leads to a defeat for other educational

communities that cannot reciprocate this generosity. Reflecting on this Coyne puts it this

way: ‗If I can withstand all this giving, then I am indeed stronger than you‘ (2005: 99-

150). Georges Bataille associates the gift with capitalist domination. He associates

Marcel Mauss‘ reference to the potlatch with emerging class struggle and oppression.

Jean Baudrillard talks about exchange of signs rather than goods (i.e. knowledge) in the

gift economy. The perceived and widely praised generosity of initiatives such as MIT

OCW has to be re-examined and differentiated in light of these considerations (para. 8).

The topography of the existing social world is not erased as a result of new forms of participatory social actions that are facilitated by web-based technologies. Terranova offers us an important reminder of this fact when she states: ―it is fundamental to move beyond the notion that cyberspace is about escaping reality in order to understand how the reality of the Internet is deeply connected to the development of late post-industrial societies as a whole‖ (2004, p. 75).

This notion is particularly true in relation to cultural institutions that are not only steeped in traditional conventions, but rely on them for their identities- as with universities. In his essay,

Scholz is careful to point out that alternative collaborative spaces need to be nurtured and recognized so as not to be ―outcollaborated‖ by the MITs of the world.

2.1.2 Free cooperation, dense networks

The literature of free and open culture is concerned with charting and theorizing the dynamics of cooperation via open digital networks as well as providing guidelines, norms of conventions for enabling the freest of possible collaborations instead of assuming that the technology reflexively provide for this. Indeed, the ―challenge‖ of Scholz‘ essay is to instil his ―social protocols of

37 collaboration‖ (par. 5), while his peer, the German writer Christoph Spehr, who coined the term

―free cooperation‖ meditates on the characteristics, traditions and politics of the many forms of free and forced collaboration both on and offline (Spehr, 2007). Like Spehr and Scholz, Geert

Lovink is concerned with the idea of collaboration, particularly as many social contexts become, increasingly networked via digital networks and as open culture becomes more ubiquitous. For

Lovink, an important question to ask in what many social theorists have named our ―network society‖ (Castells, 2007) is: where does collaboration begin and end? If all of social life is best captured by the picture of the digital network (in its various forms and manifestations between laptops, cell phones to other mobile devices), then everything is always about collaboration, which is essentially the lifeblood of the digital network. As Lovink states:

The distinction between collaboration and non-collaboration becomes more and more

difficult to make. The opposition of the lonesome genius and the multi-disciplinary team

sounds like an odd lifestyle choice and is not relevant. What is at stake is the way in

which negotiations take place inside each particular ‗credit‘ economy. Which traces

remain visible of a collaboration? Can terms of ownership be (re)negotiated further along

the line or have forms of ownership and division of labour been fixed at day one? How

many ‗defeated collaborations‘ can one bear? Humans may once have been ‗social

animals‘ but that doesn‘t mean they act like ants. There is enough herd mentality and this

makes it hard, even impossible to promote collaboration as a virtue. (Lovink, 2005)

This question, ‗where does collaboration begin and end?‘ brings us back to Terranova and

Deuze‘s ideas of labour. If we do not know where collaboration starts and ends, then do we know what is or is not, labour, which is an issue as labour becomes increasingly ―immaterial‖

(Tizianna Terranova, 2006). These questions in turn affect the social structures of institutions

38 and organizations, and the professional identities of members of institutions. However, and most important, we do not know how social lives are impacted and reconstituted, bringing us back to the necessity of theorizing with a critical gaze, free and open culture. This is what I hope my theory of DMORPs will address.

2.1.3 From open culture to open source software: Scholarly research about the open source software movement

My goal up until this point has been to present some of the literature that theorizes digitally mediated free and open culture as a way to define and describe what is meant by online collaboration which is an important aspect of free and open culture. Free and open culture is important and relevant to my research study because the open source software and the Open

Access movements are both a part of the overarching free and open culture movement.

Furthermore, the Digitally Mediated Open Research Project, which I theorize as a result of my study, is if not a version of free and open culture, then an offshoot of it.

Where the above literature looks at free and open culture in general and theorizes the larger social implications of this phenomenon- such as the dynamics of cooperation and collaboration and how they affect labour, I now turn to the literature that is about open source software specifically beginning with a brief definition and some of the earlier academic literature and progressing through to some of the later literature. I then describe some of the literature that addresses the issue of open source software specifically in relation to higher education and then describe some of the literature about the open access movement.

2.1.4 Open source software defined

Open source software is defined as software that is available for downloading off of the Internet for free. Its source code- the original ‗recipe‘ of the software- is protected by a specific intellectual property license that guarantees that it remain free and open in perpetuity (St.

Laurent, 2004). Software that is not freely available for downloading off of the web, or software that does not hold the General Public License (GPL), whose source code is closed, is not considered open source. Closed source software applications, in contrast to open source applications are (in most cases) commercially produced software applications that follow a traditional commercial economic model: they are often produced in corporate environments, and in order to use the software, users must purchase a license to access the software. Indeed users do not actually purchase the software, but rather purchase the right to use the software. As Bradley clarifies: ―users of open source software are granted the right to both the functionality of the program and the methodology (how it does what it does). Users of proprietary software only have rights to its functionality‖ (2005a, p. 590). With open source software, users are able to modify the software application, for example if they want to use it in a different way or for a different purpose, since having access to the source code of a software application means that they may alter its design and purpose, as well as easily edit and review changes. This is not the case with most closed source or commercial applications. One core argument behind the benefits of open source is that it produces technologically superior software because of how the open source process encourages easy and efficient knowledge sharing. As open source software projects grow and proliferate, researchers are paying more attention to this as a social rather than technological phenomenon as they see the value in trying to understand the dynamics and motivations of project participants.

With the success of many open source software applications, such as the Apache web server

(Mockus, Fielding, & Herbsleb, 2000), open source software has become a phenomenon of great interest to many. As a result, there is a substantial body of literature, including web sites, that exists on the topic, much of which is non-academic, non- peer-reviewed. This literature review, however, is limited to the academic studies that have been conducted on the topic of open source software.

2.2 Early research on open source software

Early characterizations of open source software depict it as a revolutionary new mode of production as part of an emerging network and knowledge society (Castells, 2000; Tuomi, 2002).

As a result, there has been much research about open source software written from economic and legal points of view. In 2001, economists Lerner and Tirole argued that the phenomenon of open source software is ―well accounted for by standard economic theory‖ (p. 821) despite the fact that open source applications do not directly garner financial remuneration for those who participate in the projects. While the authors argue that open source makes financial sense, they end their reflections with a call for empirical research into developers‘ incentives and motivations for participating in open source software projects, as well as the implications of these incentives on ―open source software developments and working‖ as well as ―other areas such as the evolution of scientific research across fields‖ (p. 826). Here the authors ask what open source can tell us about scientific development because of how open source software projects tend to mimic communities of scientific research. Indeed, this likening, an early version of the attempt to understand online collaboration has become a common thread in the discourse about open source software. Open source projects have been compared to academic communities because they draw on peer review as a quality control mechanism, as well as because of the fact

41 that they rely on voluntary (free) labour. As Bonaccorsi and Rossi (2003) explain: ―emerging as it does from the university and research environment, the movement adopts the motivations of scientific research transferring them into the production of technologies that have a potential commercial value‖ (p. 1245). Ultimately however, Lerner and Tirole, and Bonnaccorsi and Rossi end their essays with a call for more empirically oriented research into open source software.

In another early essay on open source software, the anthropologist David Zeitlyn, in making the case that in order to understand the open source software movement we need to go beyond

Raymond‘s ‗cathedral/bazaar‘ metaphor (Raymond, 1999, 2001, 2005), also calls for more research into the phenomenon. Zeitlyn argues for viewing open source software development as a type of ―gift relationship‖ that is often reflected in ―kinship structures‖: ―kinship amity can be created through interaction. And the crucial type of interaction is gift exchange‖ (p. 1290).

Ultimately, as he explains: ―I am making a strong[er] claim: that kinship amity and gift relationships actually structure the social webs that link participants in open source development.

This is an empirical claim that can be resolved by ethnographic research not through abstract discussion‖ (p. 1290). Bonaccorsi and Rossi, whose essay describing why open source succeeds despite its being based on voluntarism, and includes an extensive review of early open source applications as well as a ―model of diffusion‖ for open source applications, also admit that there are many research gaps that need to be addressed with empirical studies into the field. They state: ―many questions do however remain open. There clearly needs to be more in-depth analysis of co-ordination mechanisms, with particular reference to the precise functioning of

Open Source projects, in order to understand the role played in them by the project leaders and by the minor figures who do the non-sexy work‖ (p. 1256). Much of the literature on open source software, particularly those articles written between 2001 and 2004, which are somewhat

42 exploratory tend to conclude with a call for more empirically grounded studies. However, as a globally distributed, heterogeneous scattering of projects and communities, open source has been notoriously difficult to research. This why, as Von Krogh and Von Hippel state: ―research and theory building on open source software development should be receptive to debates in several fields and attempt to make linkages with important work done in other disciplines‖ (2003, p.

1155).

2.1.2 Empirical research on open source software: From political economy to ethnography to the „fetishization‟ of code

Some of the more empirically oriented research on open source software development can be divided, broadly, between studies on the use of open source applications, and studies into the people who participate in development or, to put it another way, are members of open source software communities. This is true despite the idea that users of OSS are also developers. Steven

Weber‘s 2004 book The Success of Open Source is a comprehensive study of open source software. In it, Weber looks at largely at well documented open source projects such as

Sendmail, Apache, and Linux, and analyzes them from a political economy perspective that is

―an analytic perspective grounded in economic assumptions‖ (p. 13). His qualitative study is based on conversations with developers, and is culled as well from the open source software web site Sourceforge.net, as well as from historical and web-based sources. Ultimately his research on OSS developers has become the starting point for much further research into open source software, since it ends with a call for more research on the various issues he presents. Gosh‘s study on Free and open source software developers, based on 2700 responses to a survey sent out across Europe, is a response to this, and is a source of empirical data on the motivations of

Free/Libre open source software developers (FLOSS) developers (Ghosh, 2005). In attempting to understand the economic impact and possible benefits of open source software, Ghosh also discovered that the overwhelming majority of developers were male. While Ghosh‘s study regarding FLOSS developers provides comprehensive information from a large population, I would argue that, at this point in time, it represents a part of the literature about open source software that is compellingly empirical, but under theorized. And of course, it is limited by its geography particularly as open source software development has flourished beyond North

America and Europe.

In contrast, the anthropologist Christopher Kelty who in theorizing his idea of ―recursive publics‖ as they are constructed by open source software developers, approaches the subject of open source as anthropologist and deploys ethnographic methods in his research. In so doing he explores open source software development in relation to ideas about culture, democracy and new forms of political engagements, and connects these with notions of identity formation. As

Kelty explains:

Recursive publics are publics concerned with the ability to build, control, modify and

maintain infrastructure that allows them to come into being in the first place and which,

in turn, constitutes their everyday practical commitments and the identities of the

participants as creative and autonomous individuals. By calling Free Software a recursive

public, I am doing two things: first, I am drawing attention to the democratic and political

significance of Free Software and the Internet; and second, I am suggesting that our

current understanding of what counts as a self-governing public, or even as the ―public‖,

is radically inadequate to understanding the contemporary reorientation of knowledge and

power. (2008, p. 7)

Kelty‘s research, which takes place in India, to which he travels to meet with a number of Indian software developer adding another important layer to the nexus of open source, politics and academic research on the subject is important because it is an example of meso-level research on open source software that theorizes one specific open source community.

Gabriella Coleman is another anthropologist who is interested in the relationship between political identity formation and the open source software movement. In her 2004 essay entitled

―The political agnosticism of free and open source software and the inadvertent politics of contrast‖, Coleman examines what open source software development means to the development and perpetuation of the public sphere via the Internet, and how developers allow this sphere to play out. That is, she makes the point that, FOSS developers declared themselves and their work as above and outside of the political world – ―political agnostics‖ by not aligning with any type of political ideology. At the same time, as Coleman argues, it would be absurd to declare that

FLOSS is apolitical. She states:

[T]he denial of FLOSS‘ formal politics enacted through a particularized cultural exercise

of free speech facilitates the broad mobility of FOSS artifacts and metaphors and thus

lays the groundwork for its informal political scope: its key role as a catalyst by which to

rethink the assumptions the assumptions of intellectual property rights through its use and

inversion. It works because it recalibrates some of the distinctions and associations

between free speech and intellectual property – it revises intellectual property law and

channels it toward the protection of free speech instead of its ‗conventional use‘ of

securing property rights. (p. 508)

Coleman‘s article about FOSS developer‘s political agnosticism of how the social life on the

Internet can play out in seemingly contradictory ways. But her article is enlightening as well for how it describes open source developers‘ relationship to their code: their ―neutral political commitments‖ (p.510) relate to the notion that all they want is freedom to code- for them it is

―an unrestricted form of creativity, expression, learning and action‖ (p. 511). Others have written as well about the act of coding and the meaning of source code (is it knowledge or is it data?) in open source software (Chun, 2008).

Where Chun writes philosophically about the act of coding (―sourcery‖) and how it ―conflates an event with a written command‖ (p. 303) others interested in the phenomenon of open source software prefer a more quantitative approach. In their 2009 study looking at the success of open source software, Lee, Kim and Gupta (2009) build a model to quantitatively assess the issue of quality in open source software asserting that ―this is the first empirical study that measures OSS success by developing an OSS success model‖ (p. 435). In their study, the authors surveyed 145 users who participated in a Linux User Group and online Linux Open Source Community, and found that ―user satisfaction [of the OSS application Linux] was significantly influenced by software quality and community service quality, and that OSS use was significantly influenced by software quality and user satisfaction‖(433). On the other end of the spectrum, O‘Mahoney looked at how software developers protect their open source software work from ―proprietary appropriation‖ applying an ―inductive qualitative approach using ethnographic methods‖ (2003, p. 1182). She found that in the majority of cases, developers employed the General Public

License and had educated themselves on its terms and conditions, and used ―formal legal mechanism to alert violators of a licensed work that are much like those used by firms‖ (p.

1188); this despite the fact that many did not have the resources or support system to protect

46 their work in the same way as proprietary firms. Hahn, Moon and Zhang (2008) used projects listed on Sourcegforge.net to look at ―how voluntary software project teams emerge from the social networks within which they are embedded in the context of open source software‖ (p. 369) and are interested in the group dynamics of the teams, how team members became involved in their projects, and how prior ties to group members affect team dynamics. Ultimately, their quantitative analysis takes discussions about developers‘ motivations, a common theme in discussions about open source software, to new levels. As they explain: ―a developer is more likely to join a project when he has developed strong collaborative ties with the project initiator through repeated collaborations and shared administrative roles in the past, demonstrating the vital role of initiators in attracting new developers‖ (p. 386). What they show is that ―software development is not only a production process but also a social process that relies heavily on interpersonal communication‖ (p. 386).

On the user side of the spectrum, Lin and Zini (2008) look at the impact of using free and open source software in a high school in Italy. Their study of the use of the Italian version of

OpenOffice, an application that is very similar in function to Microsoft Office, and a standard open source web-logging tool, shows, according to the authors: ―active cross-boundary learning and developing activities based on social networking and mutual support‖ (p. 1098). One example from this study of how this happened is seen in the development of an Italian thesaurus for the word processing application; the students at the school decided to create this functionality for the software. This of course turned into a pedagogically valuable vocabulary exercise for the students, while also rewarding them with, in a sense, something practical and tangible (i.e. their presence in a broadly distributed piece of software). As the authors explain:

Throughout the paper, we have introduced the story about implementing cost-saving and

effective FLOSS-based technologies in the Keynes High School. This system not only

fosters a local learning community integrating the physical school and the on-line

learning environment, but also bridges the local knowledge-sharing and learning with the

global Internet society. (p. 1101)

Lin and Zini‘s study resonates with the meaning and goals of this research project because, of course, it is about open source software in an educational context. Indeed, the appropriateness of open source software for the educational context, and its successful adoption within schools, both secondary and post-secondary, has been taken up elsewhere, such as Brenton Faber‘s paper on the benefits of using of open source software in universities. One last empirical study of open source software is Cromie and Ewing‘s (2008) Squatting by the digital campfire which is a qualitative study, rooted as well in anthropological methods, that ―attempts to understand the

OSS community at large‖ (p. 637). In this study, the authors eschewed the common route of studying Sourceforge data, and built a ―virtual community‖ --an online discussion space in which twenty four open source software developers from a variety of projects and places responded to questions and shared their ideas. What is interesting about this study are some of the conclusions that the authors reach- since they caused me to reflect on my own study, and how to pursue the analysis of my own data. As Cromie and Ewing explain:

[T]hinking deeply about methodological design, and entering the community

progressively and gently were critical elements of success. In retrospect, it would seem

unlikely that the study would have succeeded without several decades of direct

involvement in the software industry on the part of researchers, which served to eliminate

many preconceptions and media inspired fallacies. Of all factors, these preconceptions

came closest to scuttling the study, and serve as a clear warning that, even though the

campfire may be digital, the anthropological tradition of approaching another culture very

sensitively is as important as ever (p. 651).

The research on open source software presented thus far allowed me to reflect on its meaning and impact in methodologically and analytically and as such has contributed to the backdrop of my project. One aspect however that was absent from the literature which is a feature of my project, is the focus on the institutional or organizational situation of these projects on the meso- level.

2.2.2 Open source software as a revolutionary socio-cultural phenomenon

Apart from the empirical academic literature, much has been written about open source in terms of its contributions to larger political, socio-economic and cultural shifts associated with the

Internet. Indeed, this is one of the ideas that drives Steven Weber‘s book (2004) research and analysis, and one of the reasons why he pursues the subject as a political scientist. This notion is also a part of many other contemporary social theories. In The Network Society and the Internet

Galaxy Manuel Castells uses open source software to concretize the concept of the ―network society‖ with its emphasis on ―flows‖ of people, culture, information and capital (2010). In The

Wealth of Networks Yochai Benkler (2006), describes how free and open source software are examples of new forms of peer production at the root of a new public sphere- a new

―institutional ecology‖- in an emerging networked economy in which non-market and market oriented activities work together synergistically (ecologically), and are thus re-shaping the economic and cultural landscape. As he discusses in The World is Flat (2006) Thomas Friedman

49 also believes that open source, free software, and community based software development (all basically synonyms according to Friedman), play a role in a momentous cultural revolution. For him this revolution is about the flattening of the world, or the speeding up of globalization elements so that the world is becoming geographically placeless. It is symbolized by the development of some open source software applications- his vision of open source communities being decentralized and globally distributed (i.e. a developer in California, a developer in New

Zealand, working for disparate purposes). Open source software, according to Friedman, is ―one of the ten-forces that is contributing to the flattened world‖ (p. 50).

Some connect open source software to new forms of political action, and see it as contributing to an increased and revitalized democracy and new forms of governance. These theorists tie open source to existing theoretical works that look at the socio-political possibilities that result from the discovery of new technologies. That is, they see open source as exemplars of the new political spheres that media theorists such as Jurgen Habermas (Habermas, Crossley, & Roberts,

2004; Johnson, 2006) describe in their work on technology and democracy. Indeed this is Brent

Jesiak‘s premise in his First Monday essay on open source and the hacker ethic (2003) and Lucas

Graves‘ argument in his 2008 paper entitled ―Open source as public sphere‖(2008). Open source software has also been connected to alternative and grassroots forms of global political action, standing in contrast to what some scholars see as the spread of neo-liberal privatizing global forces (Taylor, 2005). In Open Source Democracy (2003), the media theorist Douglas Rushkoff views open source software development as central to a new form of practicing politics. For him open source software development is not only a radical idea to produce knowledge and encourage innovation through ―pooling efforts‖, but it is a movement which will change the anachronistic way that democracy is practiced in society. Thus for Rushkoff, open source is a

50 useful analogy to help envision the possibilities of what democracy can become in the near future.

Other theorists who tend to be more critical look at open source in different ways. In Empire

(2000) the Marxist philosophers Hardt and Negri argue that open source is much more of a closed and elitest community than most are willing to admit. Difference and dissent, they argue, is not tolerated, for when it occurs, open source communities tend to separate and go their own ways- code tends to be ‗forked‘. John Marshall (2008), a technology theorist, agrees that there is much technical elitism in open source communities, and argues that the decentralization of work and of social relations that characterizes these communities is not automatically more open, free and democratic. Questioning this common mythology of open source software Marshall states:

Are FOSS groups even open to those with the technical abilities? Although research has

not been detailed, it appears that these groups are male focused and not open to gender

differences. Given the history of hacking (programming), as it has been described by

Turkle (1984) and Levy (1984), this is not surprising. Most of the available comment is

written by women who participate in open source and, while defending open source

groups, they portray a society that is patronizing, aggressive, sexually obsessive and

discriminatory. (p. 19)

Another anthropologist who employs ethnography in his research, David Hakken (2003), is not critical of open source software per say, as he explains: ―I am studying advocacy for and development of Free/Libre and Open Source Software in the Malay World ... to help make studies of AICTs‘ cultural correlates more comparative‖ (p. 41) but he is critical of dominant theories of cyberspace. Hakken takes issue with notions of the new economy and the network

51 society –specifically Castells‘ formulation that frames open source as a revolutionary phenomenon. He admits he sees the potential in open source for social change, as with Rushkoff described above, but argues that it has not taken the socio-political world there as yet. Thus there is a difference between imagining what is possible, theorizing what is actual and capturing what is real. For Hakken, as with many critical internet theorists, we have spent our time imagining what can be as opposed to what he sees in his work on the ground.

Last of all, it is necessary to mention Steven Levy‘s 1984 book entitled Hacker: Heroes of the

Computer Revolution (1984) which lays out the cultural foundations of the identity of the open source software developer in his description of ―hackers‖. Hackers are computer programmers adept at and interested in taking apart and rebuilding computer applications. At the time in which

Levy studied the hacker culture, hackers were working in university laboratories, such as MIT and UC Berkeley, where the most powerful computers were located. Many of them were professors and graduate students; some were also drop outs. Richard Stallman, mentioned in the previous chapter, was considered a hacker. The hacker ethic, which Levy lays out in his book, describes the principles and beliefs that hackers held in relation to computer programming and information. One of the principles of this ethic is that ―information wants to be free‖. Hackers, according to Levy, are driven by the pursuit and development of knowledge viewing code as knowledge, and open source software developers are referred to as hackers.

2.2.3 The Intersection of open source software and universities

In this research study my goal is to theorize the composition and constitution of digital academic space. I am attempting, more specifically to depict and theorize the existence of a new organizational entity that is emerging within digital academic space which is itself becoming,

52 more and more, prevalent and important within the arena of higher education. I have named this entity Digitally Mediated Open Research Projects (DMORPS), and based on my OJS research have defined its characteristics and effects. One of the characteristics of these forms is that they are open – either open source or open access, or both, which is why knowing more about open culture, open source software and the Open Access movement is important in to this study.

DMORPs are open not only because open source software is more cost effective, more secure and more efficient from a resource perspective, but also because of the history of the open source software movement in which the university figures prominently. The academic context is a part of the history and narrative of open source software. Yet, while universities are mentioned within the history and origins of open source software development, little scholarly attention has been paid to this connection. I am attempting, therefore, to fill this research gap by researching an open source software project, its effects, characteristics and dynamics that was developed in an academic context.

One scholar who has devoted attention to the intersection of open culture and higher education and is thus important and relevant for this research study Michael Peters. In his book Knowledge

Economy, Development and the Future of Higher Education (M. A. Peters, 2007) he looks at the possibilities for academic and scientific knowledge development that could emerge from the widespread adoption and development of open culture. Peters argues that the development of knowledge networks - open source being an example of a knowledge network- may fundamentally change the form and function of the contemporary university in society. As he states: ―research is necessary to survey development in peer-to-peer production technologies and their use in higher education and in schools. The work of re-imaging the university in the age of information has just begun‖ (p. 129). Peters makes his point clear: this re-imaging must take

53 place if the university is to ―survive in any recognizable form that preserves some of the historic commitments of the modern university to independent inquiry, academic freedom and institutional autonomy‖ (p. 56). According to Peters open source, being a part of free and open culture, is an integral part of the future vision of the contemporary university, and he ends his book with a brief discussion of historical visions of freedom and their relationship to open source and free software. Ultimately however, Peters‘ account of open source is brief, and his major point about it remains grouped in with the general discussions about knowledge networks, open access, free knowledge and the roles and responsibilities of the university in a global network society. Discussions about open source within the context of higher education tend to be grouped in with discussions and arguments that favour new open forms of scholarly communications.

However, his argument lays the groundwork for a study about open source software projects developed in academic institutions.

There is a difference between open source software and the Open Access movement, even though the two movements operate ―synergistically‖ (Willinsky, 2005). As an example, MIT‘s

D-space project (www.dspace.org), which is an open source software project that facilitates green road Open Access publishing would be very different if it was a commercial or closed piece of software because the closed source code would create a barrier for other institutions to adopt it. The success of the project is premised on widespread adoption and adaptation which is in turn facilitated by the openness of open source software coding. The argument in favour of open source software (based on the success of MIT‘s projects), therefore, has been made many times over by those working within academic institutions. This represents the way open source software has been written discussed in relation to universities and post-secondary institutions.

Writing for the non-refereed e-journal published by Educause, Lakhan and Juhnjuhnwala (2008),

54 for example, review the history of open source software, the terms of the GNU, and the state of virtual higher education to make the case in favour of the adoption of open source software in higher education. However other questions need to be asked. MIT‘s work in open source and

Open Access is a good starting point; on the one hand the university provides an invaluable service by providing public access to high quality educational material and information technology applications, but on the other hand, as Scholz has pointed out, they also tend to dominate in this realm. At what point do these initiatives, then become hegemonic? How might they reproduce problematic hierarchies and social relations? As Lovink point out: ―culture cannot thrive in a monopoly situation‖ (2005, p. 4). And what of the gender issues inherent in this male dominated movement? Are they present and replicated in these academic initiatives?

Thus, as Peters asks that we re-image the university with digital networked openness in mind, it is also important to heed the advice of researchers and theorists who have learned that freedom and openness does not emerge automatically from technologies that facilitate free and open exchanges, though they may.

As open source software projects proliferate, and as the literature about them continues to grow, changes are also occurring with the field of higher education and academic knowledge production, and many of these changes are occurring as a direct result of the growth of the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) within academia. The Open Access movement which advocates for free access to scholarly research produced by universities, is a direct outcome of the confluence of ICT use in academic environments. While this research project is not formally about the open access publishing, it figures prominently into the project because the software application under investigation facilitates the publication of open access journals. It would be difficult to grasp the full impact of DMORPs without having a sense of

55 what Open Access entails, and the key themes behind it. What follows is a brief review of some key literature relating to the Open Access movement.

2.3 The literature about the Open Access movement

Within the academic context open source and open access are often mistaken for being one and the same phenomenon. As with OJS, many academic open source software projects facilitate the publication of open access journals; the aforementioned MIT projects-the OCW and Dspace - are two examples of this connection. Ultimately however, open source is about software development while open access about providing free access to scientific and academic information. Open source involves software developers, project managers and designers whose work in not confined to the academic world; advocates of open access are largely academics

(including librarians and students). What is similar about open source and open access is the move to keep information located on the web open and free, and guarantee this freedom by using intellectual property licenses such as the General Public License (GPL) in the case of open source, and the Creative Commons License (CCL) in the case of open access advocates. While here the goal is to show that open source software and Open Access are quite different, simply for the purpose of clarity, Willinsky (2005) argues that both open source and Open Access are

―proven means of resisting the constant capitalization of knowledge that marks this economy‖ and that they are ―ways of affirming the university‘s ability to contribute to the public good‖

(para. 6). Willinsky has, time and again, made the argument that Open Access via digitally networked technologies sustain, progress and enhance existing traditions of openness and public- ness to which many universities have been devoted, some since their very inception (Willinsky,

1999, 2006). Open Access is addressed in the scholarly literature in a variety of ways. Some writers have discussed the evolution and progress of the movement, describing the many

56 initiatives taking place to support and facilitate Open Access (Morrison & Waller, 2008), and the technologies, policies and information standards that need to be developed to ensure that the

Open Access is carried out in a coordinated fashion (Richardson, 2005). An important report released by the not-for-profit organization Ithaka which focuses on scholarly communications calls for a renewed focus on university publishing as its landscape is transformed by digital technologies and as the informal ―gray literature‖ that is un-reviewed pre-printed academic material proliferates (Brown, Raskoff, & Griffiths, 2007). Its main argument is to investigate the possibilities of integrating digital publishing and Open Access principles within the core university mission. Some of the reasons why this is becoming more important within the university sphere relate to the connection between collaboration and sharing of academic information and digitally mediated openness in contemporary higher education.

2.3.1 Benefits to “developing” countries

The aspect of the Open Access movement that relates best to my research study on the OJS, is the literature about the Open Access movement‘s contributions to what is referred to as ‗global development‘. Open Access advocacy is often connected to the benefits that it can bring to what theorists refer to as ―developing countries‖ and the ―digital divide‖ (Ahmed, 2007). Thus much of the literature looks at the movement‘s impact on the ―developing world‖ (Cockerill & Knols,

2008), particularly in relation to knowledge that pertains to the fields of science, technology and medicine. Writing in 2005, Leslie Chan and Sely Costa (2005) describe how ―knowledge workers‖ in developing countries are being provided with access to knowledge through the many

Open Access initiatives and Open Access networks that are aimed specifically at this task, and how they are bringing the international community closer to reaching ―the millennium goals‖. As the authors explain:

The guiding principle of the OA movement to scientific literature is the conviction that

scientific and technical information is a quintessential global public good that should be

freely available for the benefit of all. The current system of scientific publishing is

contrary to this ethos because some commercial publishers are placing excessive price

and permission barriers on research publications that are largely funded by tax dollars

and other public funds. Effectively, the public goods have been turned into a high priced

commodity affordable only to those who have the financial resources. (p. 149)

Open Access advocates argue that the fruit of the global public good that is scientific information is severely limited without Open Access, and so there is a vision of equity that is associated with its advocacy. Open Access essentially provides means for knowledge organizations with meager financial resources, most of which are located in the ‗developing world‘, a benefit never before realized without which they have almost literally been left in the dark as compared to their knowledge institutions that could afford access. Thus the connection between OA and development, and the arguments made in support of OA based on this notion. Others who have written about Open Access for the purposes of enhancing development include Arunachalam

(2008) Ahmed (2007), among others.

2.3.2 Information doubt: Skepticism regarding the benefits of Open Access for „development‟

As we have seen in the above the literature about free and open culture a sustained concern that alternative, non-hegemonic non-capitalist spaces will not be born despite the hyperbole and potentialities of networked open culture. This is true about the Open Access literature as well.

Even its supporters, including Chan and Costa point out that simply having access to scientific knowledge is not a panacea for equity by any means, for, as the authors explain,

Unless efforts are made to include locally published journals into the international

database, researchers in both the developing and developed world will not get a true

global picture of the phenomenon they study and researchers in the south will continue to

depend on a North-biased approach to solving problems. Thus they argue that ―stronger

efforts need to be made towards balancing the contents in the databases (2005, p. 147).

Other authors and scholars take a similarly critical perspective. Writing about the situation in

Trinidad-Tobago, Papin-Ramcharan and Dawe (2006) argue that full participation in the Open

Access community is difficult for researchers in developing countries due to limited technological resources and social encouragement. They conclude that international agencies working on this area need to ramp up their programs.

2.3.3 Open Access advocacy in science, technology and medicine

Just as discussions of Open Access revolve around the notion of development, so have discussions about the movement been common within the field of science, technology and medicine (STM). These two trends are not unrelated since the idea of ―development‖ is contingent on the latest advances in STM. Many of the development oriented Open Access initiatives are about providing access to research in STM- such as the Health Internetwork

Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) (http://www.who.int/hinari/about/en/), set up by the

World Health Organization (WHO) and several large scale publishers and universities to provide free access to biomedical and scientific information for low-income countries. Many of the articles in the Open Access database Pubmed, an initiative of the National Library of Medicine

(NLM) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are Open Access, and the database contains an entire section of Open Access articles called Pubmed Central. Pubmed Central articles tend to have higher impact factors than closed access articles Eysenback (2006a, 2006b), Clauson et. Al

(2008), Giglia (2007), and Mower and Youngkin (2008) wider dissemination of research being of Open Access.

2.3.4 Open Access or knowledge hegemony: Thinking critically about Open Access benefits

In her article entitled ―Of the Rich and the poor and other curious minds: On Open Access and development‖, Jutta Haider recounts the connection between OA and development, as I have above, and expresses concern over how it might empower already hegemonic discourses at the expense of alternative forms of knowledge. Haider maps and traces the discursive links of the

OA movement to two, as she explains, ―seemingly opposing ways of speaking‖ (p. 457). As she states further:

On the one hand ... OA is largely about what has been called ―Western‖, European or

modern science and ultimately it is about extending its reach through its texts. On the

other hand, OA, more than just by virtue of its name, also ties into the contemporary and

highly ambiguous discourse of openness, which is represented most prominently by the

open source and free software movements. This brings it into argumentative proximity of

what is commonly perceived as a counter movement, which positions itself in opposition

to mainstream trends. Put differently, OA ties into at least two discursive spaces which, at

least on the surface, seem to be if not fundamentally opposing, at least conflicting. One

that is firmly grounded in advancing the very type of knowledge that is associated with

modernisation and modernity and which to a degree has been interpreted as a symbol and

expression of Western dominance and its concrete consequences, and one that stands for

opposition, collaboration, participation, and resistance. (p. 457)

Haider‘s critique reflects similar concerns to what we have seen to a lesser degree in Chan and

Costa‘s works, and Papin-Ramcharan and Dawe‘s study, whereby the process of establishing equity is subverted by the very forces wishing to achieve this equity. Indeed, this is a familiar post-colonial conundrum, and it is questionable whether it can be overcome. What Haider‘s argument reminds us of is how important it is to establish and nurture alternative spaces; spaces wherein alternative epistemologies and voices may flourish.

2.4 Bits and bytes of free and open culture: Concluding remarks regarding the literature of open culture, open source and Open Access

Open source software and the OA movement are two very important socio-cultural and political phenomena, particularly as they pertain to the environment of the contemporary university. From the hacker presence of the early computer laboratory, to the growth of open source software and open access to scientific and academic literature, these two movements are amongst the most radical and revolutionary to impact upon universities and other institutions of higher education since the nineteen seventies. While much has been written, from an academic point of view, about these movements, little, if any of the literature creates a strong connection between open source and universities. Thus my study of OJS, an academic open source software project, and my theorization of the ‗DMORP‘ is aimed at filling this specific research gap. As it does so, my hope is as well to contribute to important critical conversations about networked mediated social life through my examination of the OJS, particularly in relation to, for example, the power

61 dynamics that are present in free and open culture, as well as their gender dynamics. The next chapter provides a review of theories and research about contemporary higher education, and describes how scholars within the field of higher education are arguing for new ways of understanding the university in contemporary society. This research project speaks to this call by looking at the nexus of open source software projects and contemporary university roles and relations, particularly their emerging presence in the digital academic space through studying the evolution and impact of one open source software program.

Figure 4. Screenshot of the OJS journal Community Literacy.

“The Community Literacy Journal publishes both scholarly work that contributes to the field‟s emerging methodologies and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff. We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members. We understand “community literacy” as the domain for literacy work that exists outside of mainstream educational and work institutions. It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, lifelong learning, workplace literacy, or work with marginalized populations, but it can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects. For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used. Thus, literacy makes reference not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal and technological representations as well.”

From ―About the journal‖, Community Literacy, www.communityliteracy.org.

Chapter 3: From the Condition of Publicity to Academic Capitalism: The Literature of Contemporary Higher Education

As the previous chapter indicates, there exists a large, comprehensive and rich body of literature pertaining to open and free culture, open source software, and Open Access to scholarly knowledge. My contention with this study is that examining an open source software project that was developed in an academic environment for academic purposes and thus limiting the specifics of the project in this way, will reveal more the social phenomenon, allowing me to understand it on the meso-level. The higher education situation is a large part of the story, significance and symbolism of the OJS project; the OJS also represents much in terms of the state of contemporary higher education. This significance is drawn out and deepened when framed by the current issues surrounding higher education. Thus, my purpose and goal in this chapter is to provide context to try to theorize more fully digital academic space, and the emerging organizational form that I have named Digitally Mediated Open Research Projects.

As an inter-disciplinary field of study, higher education is multi-faceted and ranges not only in terms of content and subject matter, but also in terms of ontological and epistemological starting points. Higher education research looks at all aspects of universities, colleges and other forms of post-secondary education. These include but are not limited to, for example, student experiences, pedagogy and curriculum, forms of governance, historical analyses, analyses of market and state intervention in higher education, academic freedom, forms of globalization and internationalization, and comparisons of higher education systems based on geography. The

‗massification‘ or opening up of universities to greater portions of society, along with the

64 creation of higher education systems, both public and private, around the world has lead to increased research activity within the field, as well as to the its expansion in terms of the acceptance and development of new methods and frameworks. As Malcom Tight concludes in his investigation of higher education research journals ―... a healthy higher education research community has clearly developed in North America, and is in the process of developing in other parts of the world‖ but that ―when seen in a broader perspective, higher education research remains a field of study in need of significant development everywhere (2007, p. 252). While still forming and re-forming as a field, it is fair to say that there are several persistent and recurring themes that are particular to contemporary higher education analyses. These themes are based on the notion that contemporary higher education is passing through another moment of major change.

3.1 Change as a defining feature of contemporary higher education

Changes to contemporary universities and other forms of post-secondary education are framed in different ways by different theorists. One of these frames posits that change has to do with the ways in which universities engage with the wider world and society. Whereas universities were in the past, even as they massified, sole knowledge producers that embraced and espoused a traditional unified vision of knowledge, they are now one of many knowledge producing organizations that embrace (or are beginning to embrace) a plurality of epistemological traditions

(Delanty, 2001). This is occurring, it is argued, particularly as they serve more diverse communities. The English higher education scholar Ronald Barnett positions this as an ontological/epistemological change, arguing that universities now operate within an environment of ―supercomplexity‖ (Barnett, 2000). As he explains: ―supercomplexity is the outcome of a multiplicity of frameworks ... it is not that old forms of knowing have been discarded; to the

65 contrary... to the old definitions of knowledge have appeared rival forms of knowing claiming legitimacy (p. 91).

While Barnett uses the notion of ‗supercomplexity‘ as his concept for articulating change to higher education, other theorists argue in a similar vein that universities are becoming postmodern institutions which now embrace difference, diversity and uncertainty. The French theorist Jean-Francois Lyotard famously wrote about universities‘ involvement in the postmodern condition in 1979, making the point that the status of universities and academics in society was declining, or at the very least changing. He also linked knowledge production to new processes of commodification (Lyotard, 1986), which is seen in a more heightened fashion in the current university environment, decades after he wrote. Lyotard‘s impact on other researchers and writers in the field cannot be denied as they work to understand how his concepts and ideas have been playing themselves out all around the world (Bloland, 1995; Delanty, 2003; M. Peters

& Marshall, 1996; Roberts, 1998). Speaking within the context of British higher education,

Kumar argues that as post-modern institutions that engage with the wider world as opposed to nurturing elite traditions, universities are now ―sites of cultural exploration and engagement‖ that

― in an increasingly home-based privatized society ... draw people out of their private spaces and for a brief but crucial time, encourage them to engage in shared public time‖ (Kumar, 1997, p.

34). Universities are facing difficulties defending their territory as the singular knowledge producer in society, particularly in the face of post-industrial economic conditions (Scott, 1997).

Higher education theorists and researchers are grappling with the notion that there is a plurality of knowledge frameworks and epistemologies, and are trying to gauge the effects of this notion in the literature.

The theorizing of the post-modern university dates back at least ten years. While still valid and relevant for understanding change in higher education (certainly Lyotard‘s vision has stood the test of time), and so for opening this literature review, the conversation regarding the changing role of universities in society has since moved forward to include even more updated formulizations of change. These include the notion of universities operating within an era of

―Mode 1/Mode 2 knowledge production‖, within the ―condition of publicity‖, under ―neo-liberal circumstances‖, in which ―academic capitalism‖ and ―entrepreneurialism‖ are dominant decision making factors.

3.1.1 Mode 1 versus Mode 2 research

Nowotny, Gibbons and Scott offer another, perhaps more updated perspective on the epistemological changes occurring within universities (Gibbons et al., 1994; Nowotny, Scott, &

Gibbons, 2001, 2003). Less an argument in terms of post-modernism and supercomplexity, in their theory, viewed by critics as the embodiment of knowledge commodification, the authors posit that the way knowledge is produced in the current era has shifted from being largely discipline based which they label ‗Mode 1‘, to being trans-disciplinary, developed on diverse knowledge sites within reflexive teams of experts, for the purpose of being socially applicable.

This they refer to as Mode 2 research. Writing in defence and explanation of their theory, which garnered heavy criticism the authors state: ―closure of the Mode 2 debate is neither possible nor desirable. The project has many characteristics of the much more open knowledge production systems that it is attempting to analyze- wide social distribution, trans-disciplinarity, the need for social robustness, and the creative potential of controversies‖ (2003, p. 192). While it is difficult to determine whether the authors are arguing in favour of the development of the ascendance of

‗Mode 2‘ research (certainly their tone is celebratory), or whether they believe they are simply

67 documenting an emerging trend, the model of Mode 1/ Mode 2 research has made a large impact within the higher education research literature as many researchers have used it to frame their own research (Jansen, 2002; Lenhard, Holger, & Schwechheimer, 2006; Vessuri, 2000;

Wickham & Collins, 2006; Winberg, 2006). While adopted largely by researchers studying the production particularly of scientific knowledge, others more interested in global higher education have also used it in their research. David E. Bloom, for example, draws from it as a way of articulating possibilities for higher education reform in the developing world. He states:

[B]ecause of the rapid expansion of knowledge, most of the information required to solve

a problem inevitably lies elsewhere. Universities – the traditional guardians of knowledge

development – are therefore forced to link up with other institutions of higher education

as well as with non-educational institutions, which may be drawn from industry,

business, government or elsewhere. These networks of expertise, which ‗bubble up like

molasses on the stove‘ as intellectual resources shift from area to area, problem to

problem, grouping to grouping, can trigger innovation and thus economic development.

Very few developing countries are making the most of this opportunity (Bloom, 2005, p.

28).

The Mode 1/Mode 2 knowledge paradigm has been championed by some and disputed by many.

That it has received widespread attention supports the notion that change within the realm of post-secondary and higher education is occurring, and this change relates, at least to some degree, to how knowledge is organized, produced and reproduced. Snydman and Gumport take up this idea in their longitudinal study of academic structures, where they look at ―how institutional structures and practices support and reconstitute categories of knowledge‖ (Gumport

& Snydman, 2002, p. 379). The notion of studying this ―meso-level‖ is relevant for universities

68 which they posit are organized around knowledge categories (i.e. departments of history), as well as for legitimating forms of knowledge. As they state:

Since institutional settings shape knowledge classifications, it is worthwhile to develop a

more refined conceptualization of the interplay between context and knowledge

categories. Educational settings are ideal sites for examining the co-evolution of

knowledge with academic structure. The work of new sociologists of knowledge suggests

that the analysis of the institutional settings may yield new insights about the

interdependence between context and ideas, specifically how structure and content

reinforce social hierarchies as well as the authoritativeness of knowledge. (p.402)

Snydman and Gumport‘s line of inquiry demonstrates how the growth in the production of Mode

2 research is changing not only the shape of knowledge, but also the shape of universities. This context is important for this research study, which documents the story of the development and dissemination of one information technology project whose aim is to open up knowledge and participate in the dissolution of information boundaries that have become, some would argue, with the development of ICTs, artificial. The rise of inter-disciplinarity, and the re-purposing of the academic function creates the imperative to expand the study of academic knowledge beyond the boundaries of the institution to other organizational forms. This is one of the objectives of my research study.

3.1.2 ICTs in higher education

Changes in higher education, along with the development of new knowledge production processes have much to do with the integration of information and communication technologies

(ICTs) into universities and other forms of post-secondary education. Indeed, these changes have

69 been so dramatic and pervasive that there is no dearth of literature that attempts to capture, understand, and advise upon ICTs in higher education. Some of this literature is broad and empirically based, such as Collis and Van der Wende‘s report tackling the entire subject, looking at ICT adoption on the institutional level across various post-industrial nations (Collis & van der

Wende 2002), and Löfström and Nevgi‘s study that looks at ICT use in learning across a range of different user groups (Löfström & Nevgi, 2006). Still others look at large scale ICT transformation, including Webster and Robins (Robins & Webster, 2002), and (Cornford &

Pollack, 2003).

More recent discussions about ICTs in higher education tend to focus less on technological aspects, and more on the organizational context of ICT use. As an example, Canchu and Ha

(2009) compare attitudes towards ICT use across different organizational units, concluding that professional academic units as opposed to administrative and arts oriented academic units tend to be the most successful with ICTs, while Sanchez-Franco et. al (2009) associate the cultural and national contexts with the way ICT is used at different universities (i.e. academics located at

Nordic universities use the web one way, while European-Mediterranean academics use the

Internet in a different way). What these studies highlight is that context is very important to understanding ICT use in universities, be it the cultural or the organizational context. While they are just two examples of ICTs in higher education, they are examples that represent that few if any of the studies look beyond either the academic/ professor/student or the institution as a unit of study.

Recent student research theses approach the study of ICTs in higher and post-secondary education using more contemporary approaches and methods. Much of this research examines the effects of delivering instruction using different pedagogical models through a combination of

70 the Internet and in class instruction. As an example, Yang, from the University of British

Columbia (2006) researched students‘ ―social presences‖ online in a mixed mode course. Ingram

(2006), however, ventured outside of the often discussed connection between ICTs and curriculum deliver to evaluate the symbolism of university homepage design.

3.1.3 Cyber-infrastructure projects

Cyber-infrastructure projects are web-based initiatives that strengthen the links between information, data, research and knowledge (largely scientific) and as such play a role in discussions about ICTs and higher education. Indeed, the National Science Foundation (NSF) created a strategic program to ramp up the development of cyber-infrastructure to facilitate academic collaboration and communications in the United-States (2007). For universities, cyberinfrastructure projects represent a strategic way around investing in expensive hardware and software particularly as they continue to operate under intensely strained budgets; they also require a mindset of careful coordination within and between institutions (Hacker & Wheeler,

2007). Cyber-infrastructure projects, which often form the underlying foundation of research support for academics, have become an important issue in the research literature, making it on, for example, the Educause Review‘s list of top ten important IT issues (Scrivener-Agee & Yang,

2009). Most of this literature however falls outside of the spectrum of higher education into the realm of, for example, information management and studies (Duderstadt, 2009; Meyer &

Schroeder, 2009; Smith & Leney, 2009). Since the projects are distributed and aim to foster collaboration emphasizing the role of networks, they are very often open source /open access and tend to ―embrace open standards‖ (Mackie, 2007). And since, a great number of these projects are funded by grants, as opposed to the institutions themselves, many IT administrators are concerned about their viability and sustainability when funding runs out. This is what Mackie, an

71 administrator with the Mellon foundation, writes about in his piece about cyber infrastructure projects.

Discussions about cyber infrastructure projects are important within this literature review because they come closest to resembling what is being discussed within this research project.

The PKP/OJS can be considered a ‗cyber infrastructure project‘ though it has not been formally designated as such by anyone involved in it. It has, as an example, secured several large grants for its support and development (including a Mellon grant), and, because there is, as Mackie points out, always the concern for the sustainability of funded IT projects, PKP/OJS has been developed openly and with inter-operability in mind. What little literature on cyber-infrastructure projects does exist does not contain much in terms of empirical data, while none of it seeks to extrapolate the projects‘ larger meaning and significance in higher education.

3.1.4 The condition of publicity

As seen above, there is a significant amount of literature that looks at the presence of ICTs in post-secondary and higher education, and even some literature that resembles and informs the research undertaken in this project. However none of these studies attempt to examine the subject deeply, from a more critical perspective. One study however that connects well to my research project is McLennan et. al.‘s essay entitled ―Universities in ‗the condition of publicity‘(2005a) in which the authors, drawing from Lyotard‘s theory of performativity

(Lyotard, 1986) analyse the meaning of strategic efforts put forth by the London School of

Economics (LSE) to ameliorate and strengthen its public image through various channels of communication and operate within what they call the ―condition of publicity‖. As they state:

[A] ‗condition of publicity‘ is now central to the maintenance of academic eminence.

This refers to the imperative to be, and be seen to be, not only ‗engaging with the wider

world‘ (Barnett, 2003, p.74), but also producing the sort of ‗informational ideas‘ that

appeal to policymakers and that take their place in the contemporary mediascape. ... we

need to think carefully about the type of ideas, and corresponding mode of intellectual

work that is being generated in the ‗condition of publicity‘. (p. 245)

Thus the study looks at the different initiatives that the LSE engaged in to strengthen its public image, the effects of these strategies in terms of aligning and re-aligning the institution‘s political connections, as well as the institute‘s involvement in public life and policymaking. Some examples of these strategies involve, as the authors explain, the hiring of high profile intellectuals and academics, hosting public lectures, and the concerted effort to improve the institution‘s performance on the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). Other vehicles that contribute to ―the normalisation of publicity‖ include communication strategies such as branding via logos, glossy internal newsletters showcasing academic research findings, ―actual dealings with journalists, and streamlining the in-house and publicly oriented LSE communication channels‖ (p. 249). What the authors show is not only what it means to ―inhabit the condition of publicity‖ (p. 241) in terms of defining what it means, as above, but also how inhabiting this condition has changed the LSE‘s cultural and social function. As they state: ―through official bodies, and via a proliferation of quasi-governmental and civil society seminars, meetings, and briefings, dialogue is invited and ‗expert‘ advice sought and touted on a larger range of issues.

Working in these open and opportunistic networks can be sharply contrasted to earlier phases in which an LSE elite influenced government personnel directly, often confidentially, and largely along party lines‖ (p. 252). The LSE, an institute that produces applied knowledge and research,

73 has always been involved in policy and politics. However, as the authors contend, the nature of this involvement has changed. They conclude their study by connecting it back to the higher education literature, explaining how their work fits with these theories. As they state:

We have ... sought to exemplify how ‗the knowledges of the academy are now

intertwined with those of the wider world‘ (Barnett, 2003, p. 13), and how institutional

practices are being developed through networks of actors that cross boundaries among

universities and colleges, business and non-profit organizations, and state(s)‘ (Slaughter

& Rhoades, 2004, p.9). Our analysis has shown that if there is an undeniable

development at LSE in the direction of the enterprise university and even academic

capitalism, there is still no single institutional story to be told. (pp. 257-258)

The condition of publicity is important to mention here because of how it contributes to an understanding of the meaning of the PKP/OJS project by exemplifying a reading of university activities that considers media as a primary analytical category. It sets an important precedence that works to legitimize and contextualize the subject of my study and my theorization of

DMORPs, particularly as it is a singular, qualitative research piece.

3.1.5 Globalization and higher education

The globalization of higher education represents a main theme within the literature of contemporary higher education. Globalization is a contested term, and can be defined in many ways. The phenomenon of people and cultural symbols migrating to different places across and throughout the world has existed for millennia. And indeed, universities have played a large role in this form of globalization, through, for example, student exchanges. However, as Harvey explains (Harvey, 1990) contemporary globalization is enacted by the extreme and increased

74 frequency resulting from the compression of time and space over electronic networks. He furthermore describes how contemporary globalization has affected contemporary economic modes and markets, which are marked by their flexibility, the forging and splitting of large transnational corporations which erode and create new labour markets, and what he refers to as the increased phenomenon of flexible accumulation. While this describes one facet of globalization (largely the economic), other theorists define globalization in other ways.

Appadurai assumes a more culturally oriented approach by describing the many different

―scapes‖ that globalization facilitates, at the centre of which is the media, prime diffuser of all of this culture. Sassen uses space and gender (and their intersection) as prime conceptual categories in the definition of globalization, arguing that what seem like fixed spatial categories are remade as a result of contemporary globalization agents. Changes brought on by globalization do not involve only the powerful players in society such as nation-states, institutions involved in the distribution of global capital, or international organizations like the World Bank, but also the unofficial, undocumented and unrecognized elements in society, the ―enormous variation of micro-processes‖ (Sassen, 1998) that cause the reformulation of the traditional identities, agents and conceptual categories- such as the way states cast, identify and legislate women.

Globalization is a significant theme within the field of higher education and global forces are manifested in several specific ways. As the literature shows, these include increased and expanded student and faculty exchanges which are highly asymmetrical in their North to South flows, intensified activities and partnerships between major research universities, most of which are located within large urban environments, as well as greater competition between institutions

(Altbach & Teichler, 2001; Marginson, 2004b). Added to these elements are the effects of the

Internet which ―facilitates world wide databases and collaboration between faculty‖ and enable

75 information and knowledge to be highly mobile (Marginson & Wende, 2007). Global forces have also disrupted what has become the traditional role of governments in higher education. As

Horta explains: ―supra-national institutions, such as the OECD, have guided national policies towards higher education leading to major systemic and structural changes in managerial attitudes and cultures, the changing role of the State, from a position of almost full control to one of steering from a distance which has resulted in increased institutional autonomy and the promotion of schemes of performance based-funding and institutional competition‖ (2009, p.

388). Thus it is clear not only that global elements have affected nearly all spheres of higher education, but also that these elements have created and re-created new pockets of discussion and action within the field. At the same time, in Canada where higher education is a provincial matter, no federal meta-strategies or policies have been created to address the notion of globalization, though as Troliokekar, Jones and Shubert show, there are examples of university based initiatives that address cross-border, global and international realities (Trilokekar, Jones, &

Shubert, 2009). The question is: how, if at all, is globalization present in the OJS, and by extension within DMORPs?

As in many fields where global elements are having a significant impact, the task of selecting a suitable way to ground and capture the effects of global factors in higher education has been a topic of debate by researchers and theorists. Deem (2001), for example takes issue with both the theoretical analytics and the methodologies that Slaughter and Leslie (1997) and Clark (1998) employ, arguing against their rigid attachment to an economic version of globalization as a focus of their studies. As she states:

So far, it appears that it is easier to make claims about the effects of globalisation

(especially economic globalisation) and internationalisation (particularly the

internationalisation of certain knowledge areas, such as bio-science or management) on

higher education than it is to demonstrate empirically, except rather superficially, how

these effects operate at the level of individual universities. It is also easy to forget about

the importance of local and regional differences, or see these as largely subordinate to

more global factors. The methods used to investigate claims for global influences on

higher education perhaps need to pay more attention rather than less to the subtleties of

cross-cultural analysis, to ethnographic techniques of research, and to case study

strategies. (p. 17)

What Deem is establishing is the need for the development and implementation of new analytics to capture the complexities created by global forces in higher education. As global conditions continue to pervade the sphere of higher education, it is necessary to continuously revise analytical categories and understand these conditions from new starting points and perspectives.

Jones and Padure (Jones & Padure, 2009) explain why this is important in their discussion of policy networks in higher education. As they explain: ―loose and informal arrangements and interactions may play a very important role within policy networks, but these arrangements are difficult to identify and study. On the other hand, failing to raise these questions can lead to inappropriate assumptions about the respective roles of different actors in the policy process, or lead to research that is blind to what may be dramatic debates or political conflicts underscoring policy processes‖ (2009, p. 119). Finding a way to capture what is not obvious begins by casting aside assumptions about how things happen within the sphere of higher education; that for example, an institutional policy about information technology created by a high level administrator might not tell an institution‘s IT story.

3.1.6 The GloNaCal Agency heuristic

Marginson and Rhoades‘ (2002) essay entitled ―Beyond national states, markets, and systems of higher education: A glonacal agency heuristic‖ addresses the emergence of global conditions within the realm of higher education research. In their essay they aim to overcome the limitations of analytical models and categories employed within the field of higher education such as

―national states, markets and systems of higher education‖ (p. 282). As they explain further:

One of our aims is to advance the significance of studying global phenomena. Yet we do

not see such phenomena as universal or deterministic in their effects; thus, we also

feature the continued significance of the national dimension. Further, as we do not see

either global or national phenomena as totalizing in their effects, we feature the

significance of the local dimension (p. 289).

Thus we see the authors attempting to re-conceptualize and widen the spatial boundaries common to higher education research. But they are careful as well, not to fall into the trap of being overly universalistic or deterministic. As such they include within their heuristic two forms of ―agency‖: agencies as different types of organizations, and agency as collective human action.

As they explain:

First, we utilize agency in the sense of an entity or organization that could exist at the

global, national, or local level. There are international organizations such as the World

Bank (or regional entities such as the European Union). There are also governmental

units within nation-states such as ministries of education and national legislatures. And

there are local entities such as individual institutions of higher education. Each of these is

an agency. Yet there is a second meaning of the term that refers to the ability of people

individually and collectively to take action (exercise agency), at the global, national and

local levels... there are local collectivities such as professors and administrators in a

department or institution that influence local practice and take initiative for their units to

compete in international higher education markets. (p. 289)

The GloNaCal Agency heuristic resonated with my choice to study something that was networked globally without reducing it to the common and somewhat flattened frame of globalization in higher education. It was important for me to make room in the project for the many elements, levels and characteristics present in the research topic and to account for any contradictions that these levels and dynamics introduced. As Marginson and Rhoades explain:

―we emphasize the intersections, interactions, mutual determinations of these levels (global, national, and local) and domains (organizational agencies and the agency of collectivities). We do not see a linear flow from the global to the local; rather we see simultaneity of flows‖ (p.

289). What they conclude is that ―globally shaped patterns are layered on top of existing structures, and lead to varying patterns of national and local adaptation and resistance‖ (p. 299).

Another instance of the heurisitic is in Marginson‘s paper describing status competition in higher education (2004b). In this paper he argues that neo-liberal and market trends are affecting social competition between universities, and that these are causing a ―steepening of hierarchies‖ between universities. He refers to the GloNaCal analytical heuristic as a ―mode of thought‖ which he uses to understand the ―mutually constituting global, national and local elements that are now shaping higher education everywhere‖ (p. 177). Ultimately, Rhoades and Marginson wish to underscore the notion that global factors and elements are neither inexorable nor unidirectional, both in general and within the realm of higher education, and that new research

79 and analytical methods need to be developed and employed in order to capture and assess the complexities of contemporary globalization in higher education.

Another academic study that employs the GloNaCal Agency heuristic is Sakari Ahola‘s essay entitled ―Global and local priorities in higher education policy: A headache at the national level?‖ (2005). In it, Sakari describes the contradictory pursuits of two working group documents on higher education in Finland, one describing new ways to internationalize Finland‘s higher education sector, the other advocating for the strengthening of local and regional communities via higher education. Ahola uses the GloNaCal agency heuristic to analyze the effects and intersections of these two documents and argues that the traditional roles of the national and the local, while not obsolete, have shifted as a result of international agencies (such as the European

Union) and globalization. The heuristic provides Ahola with a framework by which to recognize these shifting boundaries, the resulting contradictions, and ultimately serves as a call for more complex and multi-dimensional views of contemporary higher education. Rhoades‘ and

Marginson‘s analytical heuristic serves as a solid starting point for this research, and was pivotal in the selection and legitimization of this study. Similarly my study of one open source software project, developed and disseminated in academic environments includes multiple locational levels with complex dynamics and inter-relations.

3.1.7 The development function as an offshoot of global effects in higher education

Over the past decade Michael Peters and Mark Olssen have written extensively on digitization, knowledge networks, learning and knowledge economies, and information technologies in relation to higher education (2005; M. A. Peters, 2006, 2007). Their discussions also involve

80 discussions about globalization and universities‘ responses to contemporary manifestations of globalization. In his more recent work, Peters has connected these changes specifically to the function of global development, and he argues that contributing to global development is one of the emerging responsibilities of the university sector. As he states:

The politics and ethics largely concern the renewed focus on responsibilities that Western

universities must identify if they are to face up to the deepening structural inequalities

between North and South and to promote the idea of global citizenship and global civil

society. Today the ideas of regional and international development depend on a nuanced

reading of the ―new economy‖ or the ―knowledge economy‖ and the new spaces and

possibilities that have emerged for preserving the university‘s traditional critical

functions and for promoting public knowledge (knowledge as a global public good) in the

service of new ethical, legal and political responsibilities that have opened up as a result

of globalization.

Peters ultimately concludes that ―higher education and universities, in particular, need to preserve their traditional critical cultural functions, enshrined in the Idea of the Kantian

University while becoming more oriented toward ‗development‘ both home and abroad‖( p.

131). This is because knowledge networks which are becoming more pervasive particularly in universities play a large role in introducing a postmodern state - both to the world in general and to the university- and ―postmodernization functions in part as a critique of modernization theory and in part as a programme for developing networks‖ (p. 133). Thus one of the new missions of the contemporary university is to contribute to the undoing of the mistakes of modern university missions which included for example, their role in the project of colonialism, and the exclusion

81 of different or alternative forms of knowledge from the modern academic knowledge network.

As Peters states:

The emergence of the global networked information economy made possible by

increasingly cheaper processors linked as a pervasive network has created an information

economy based on the production of information and culture that enables social and

nonmarket or peer-to-peer production and exchange to play a, perhaps even the central

role. Research is necessary to survey development in peer to peer production

technologies and the use in higher education and in schools. (p. 129)

There is a connection between his argument and this study into open source software produced by universities; open source software is a form of peer-to-peer (non-market) production that facilitates knowledge exchange and collaboration. Questions that can be drawn based on Peters‘ argument and answered by this study is: to what extent is this idea feasible? Do these technologies really enable these types of results? And if so, what are the contextual details and circumstances that facilitate these results? Peters‘ ideas remain theoretical, and empirical research is needed to progress this conversation.

What is most interesting about Peters‘ statements above, however, is his re-framing or

―reimaging‖ of the role of contemporary universities to contribute to global development through knowledge and information exchange as exchange technologies grow more sophisticated. This is because, as I have seen in this research, many of the digitally mediated projects that universities are engaging in, such as the OJS, have evolved organically from small web based experiments into larger projects that serve global development. As universities attempt to contribute to global civil society via the internet, and as development studies become more important within higher

82 education, as Peters shows, it is necessary to understand empirically more about the impact of these initiatives.

3.1.8 Problematizing the discourse of development

As we have seen in the previous chapter in relation to the benefits of Open Access and as we see above, the idea of serving ‗development‘ and ‗the developing‘ world with academic knowledge via digitally mediated networks is an important and recurring theme. As this is so, it is necessary to mention here the work of scholars who react against the idea of ‗development‘ and of the

‗developing world‘. This scholarship, represented by Haider‘s (2007) piece is not necessarily anti-open access or open source, or even against the diffusion of digitally mediated networks.

Rather, these scholars question the construction of the idea of the ‗developing world‘, and problematize it for its underlying power dynamics.

Thus the question would is: how does open culture, open source and the Open Access movement construct, produce, and objectify the boundaries of the ‗developing world‘? How might these digitally mediated social movements re-inscribe colonialist ―genealogies‖(1997) within digital academic space? These questions are incredibly important to examine, particularly in world of cultural production- i.e. the academy. Writing prior to the frenzied deployment of digitally mediated networks, Chandra Talpade Mohanty explains this perspective. As she states:

Radical educators have long argued that the academy and the classroom are not mere

sites of instruction. They are also political and cultural sites that represent

accommodations and contestations over knowledge by differently empowered social

constituencies. Thus teachers and students produce, reinforce, recreate, resist, and

transform ideas about race, gender, and difference in the classroom. Also, the academic

institutions in which we are located create similar paradigms, canons and voices, that

embody and transcribe race and gender. (p. 183)

In her essay, Mohanty shows how education is a ―central terrain‖ where struggles of power and politics play out. In another essay, Mohanty, with her colleague Alexander (1997) discuss how women‘s studies in the 1990‘s was complicit in practicing exclusionary forms of politics and was limiting in the way that it cast the idea of women‘s studies. Whereas the authors deconstruct the legacies and histories of the way Black and Brown women are constructed by the state and capitalism as way of reconstructing women‘s studies- and perhaps by extension recreating academic scholarship, it makes sense as well, to look at how academics in so-called ‗developing countries‘ are constructed by academics within the open culture movement.

Deborah Barndt, a professor and community activist involved in cross cultural initiatives at York

University discusses the challenge of reframing the internationalism that has traditionally been in place in universities so that it reflects and embraces a post-colonial perspective (Barndt, 2009).

In describing two initiatives in place at York University, one that ―aboriginalizes‖ (p. 205) a program‘s curriculum (by accepting student theses in indigenous languages in one program), and one that places the concept of diaspora at the center of discussions about equity and diversity within university curricula. As she and Mohanty show, there is still much work that needs to be done in decolonizing universities, to move for instance from models of internationalization to what is truly post-colonial. But, as she states, optimistically: ―universities are sites of creative knowledge production and have the potential to embrace this challenge in a post-colonial polycultural world‖ (p. 211). So my question is: where do OJS, digital academic space in which universities from all over the world interact and collaborate, and DMORPs, which, because they are open facilitate inter-university collaboration, fall on this spectrum?

3.1.9 Academic capitalism and neo-liberalism

While McLennan et al. argue that academic capitalism does not tell a ‗singular‘ institutional story, the concept, developed originally by Leslie and Slaughter (1997), and then re-developed and updated considering the new information economy into account (Slaughter & Rhoades,

2004), has a large impact on the field of higher education. Academic capitalism, as Slaughter and

Rhoades explain ―focuses on networks- new circuits of knowledge, interstitial organizational emergence, networks that intermediate between public and private sector, extended managerial capacity- that link institutions as well as faculty, administrators, academic professionals and students to the new economy‖ (p. 15). What they highlight in their research is not how profit oriented corporations are encroaching on universities, but rather how universities have, on every front, re-oriented their behaviour, so that there is a ―blurring of boundaries among states, markets and higher education‖ (p. 11). Many higher education researchers have employed the concept of academic capitalism to see how it manifests in different ways and contexts. As an example,

Mendoza looks at how academic capitalism affects the ―socialization‖ of doctoral students

(2007). Not all of the studies investigating forms of academic capitalism, however, assume a critical approach. Renault, as an example, argues that university policies and concerns about academic capitalism limit the economic productivity of universities (2006).

As Rhoades, Slaughter and Leslie describe a new culture of academic capitalism that is becoming dominant in contemporary universities, other theorists have written about a pervasive and attendant issue born as a result of academic capitalism: changes to the labour structure of universities. Drawing from the works of Weber and Foucault, Parker and Jarry describe the rise in power and number of university managers and the decline of full professors (1995), while

Rhoades discusses ―the politics of professional work that surround the managerial press for

85 greater flexibility in dealing with academic personnel‖ (Rhoades, 1996). The growth of part time flexible labour in the university is an important topic within the literature of contemporary higher education. For the most part-time, the issue is discussed in terms of sessional instructors, part- time untenured faculty ―contingent faculty‖ (G. Bradley, 2004; Rajagopal, 2002), and contract researchers as described by Hey (2001), who aspire to become tenured academics in the face of diminishing possibilities (Rhoades, 1998). Not only does part time work negatively affect the hiring practices of institutions for graduates, but more importantly, it erodes the practice of academic freedom and facilitates a culture wherein academics feel concern regarding the work that do.

Just as there is research looking at the rise of part time and flexible labour in the contemporary university, connecting it to the phenomenon of academic capitalism, there is also a subset of research that looks at how academics connect their work to their own spiritual belief system and activist causes, this despite the undue influence of corporatizing forces. Indeed, Kezar and

Lester‘s article actually conjoins these two issues, showing that as universities become more capitalistic and cut full time positions, grassroots leadership has been growing as a means of addressing difficult and challenging circumstances (2009). Their research shows that in the face of difficult institutional practices, academics tend to be supportive of each other. Shahjahan‘s doctoral thesis, a qualitative study, looks at academics who practice what he describes as

―spiritual praxis‖, arguing that integrating spirituality and activism into university teachings and institutional practices is beneficial particularly as universities increasingly hegemonic forces (R.

Shahjahan, 2007; R. A. Shahjahan & Barker, 2009). And while the literature of academic activism requires more space than can be permitted here, it is important to remember that the

86 roots of many academic disciplines required much activism to be accepted as part of the academic canon.

3.1.10 Bright spaces or dark spaces?

The main question that I wish to ask in light of the various frames and issues that are present in the literature of higher education is: what does the OJS represent? The point of placing this exploration of the OJS within a framework that considers the themes, theories and issues of higher education is to theorize its significance within this important and ever changing social arena. Therefore, if universities are in a state of extreme instability, if they are changing and reformulating, how might the OJS either contribute to these changes or work to sustain their traditions (or both)? If these changes are best described as capitalistic and neo-liberal, then how might the OJS contribute to and (or) challenge these directions? Does the OJS embody and exemplify the principles of the GloNaCal agency heuristic? How might the project contribute to the reformulation of these higher education theories? What this review shows is that researchers and theorists from within the field have been grappling with the idea that contemporary universities are changing as a result of global forces and information technology, and that new conceptual tools and research practices are needed to grapple with these changes. This investigation into the development of one open source software application aims to fill an existing research gap, the grey space of digital academic space, to fit into the spaces between the literatures presented here.

Figure 5. Screenshot of the OJS journal Information Technologies & International Development.

Information Technologies & International Development focuses on the intersection of information and communication technologies (ICT) with economic and social development. It is a peer-reviewed, international, multidisciplinary quarterly designed for researchers and practitioners from the engineering and social sciences, technologists, policy makers, and development specialists. In addition to peer-reviewed original research, ITID publishes notes, letters, and reports that respond to previously published articles; summaries of conferences, workshops, and other relevant meetings; reviews of new books of interest to the field; and overviews of emerging research areas and new ideas.

From about the journal, Informational Technologies and International Development, itidjournal.org

Chapter 4: Situating this Analysis: Methodology and Methods for Capturing the Meaning of OJS

In the preceding literature review of contemporary higher education scholarship I describe how both the field and the sector have been undergoing a period of great change on the organizational, administrative and epistemological levels. These changes are connected to the diffusion of digitally mediated networks, and to free and open culture. In the previous chapter I introduced some important concepts and theoretical constructs such as the ―condition of publicity‖ (McLennan, Osborne, & Vaux, 2005b), ―GloNacal agency heuristic‖ (Marginson &

Rhoades, 2002), ―knowledge capitalism‖(M. A. Peters, 2007), and the seminal idea ―academic capitalism‖(Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004), which together form a foundation for this research study of the PKP/OJS. At the same time, the aim of this project is to go beyond the prevailing perspectives of higher education inquiry in order to understand a growing phenomenon that has yet to be analyzed or addressed in depth or empirically in the literature—the impact of digitally networked information technology projects, here called Digitally Mediated Open Research

Projects, in the form of open source software projects, on universities. This is why I begin this thesis with a discussion about the literature of free and open culture drawing from the ideas of

Scholz, Lovink, Terranova and Deuze. While this research project is located within the field of higher education studies and employs concepts and theories from within the field to frame the analysis, ultimately this is an inter-disciplinary study of one open source software project that is framed by ideas from within the field of higher education as well as from critical internet studies.

4.1 Situational analysis

The second frame of this research project describes the approach used to answer the questions that theory helped raise, and so relates more to describing the methods of analysis employed in this project. Adele Clarke‘s method of situational analysis (Clarke, 2005) is a reformulation of

Glazer and Strauss‘ (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) research method entitled grounded theory. With situational analysis, Clarke attempts to overcome some of the epistemological challenges of grounded theory following the emergence and dispersion of ‗post-modern‘ ways of knowing.

Thus, situational analysis is, as the title of Clarke‘s book proclaims ―grounded theory after the postmodern turn‖. As Clarke explains in her prologue:

The most innovative part of my project is to also bring the social- the full situation of

inquiry- further around the postmodern turn and ground it in new analytic approaches that

do justice to the insights of post-modern theory‖ (p. xxvii).

Thus, in her methodology, Clarke integrates important concepts from the work of various postmodern theorists, such as Stuart Hall and Michel Foucault, into grounded theory. This, I feel, is in harmony with the epistemological tack of my project. This is because as Clarke explains: ―our analytic focus needs to go beyond ―the knowing subject‖ and be fully on the situation of inquiry broadly conceived, including the turn to discourse‖ (p. xxviii). In situational analysis, the researcher constructs three types of ‗maps‘ that ultimately represent the situation that is being studied. These three maps include 1) a situational map detailing all of the different elements

(human, non-human and discursive) that are included in the situation that is being studied, 2) a social worlds/ arenas map, which documents all of the collective entities and commitments in the project and looks at the power dynamics between these entities, and 3) positional maps, which

90 describe the various centres and peripheries that are present within the research situation as a means of ―getting at the range of variation‖(p. 25) which more functionally oriented grounded theory studies tend to either miss or ignore. All of the maps are variations of the first situational map; they are meant to take research beyond simply the words and statements of participants in the project; to consider their locationality and other elements with which they interact. The goal of a situational analysis is not to derive a theory out of existing data, but rather to create an interpretive analysis of a situation and it is the situation that is the object (or subject) of analysis.

As Clarke continues: ―situational analyses seek to analyze a particular situation of interest through the specification, re-representation, and subsequent examination of the most salient elements in that situation and their relations.‖ Instead of theory making, researchers are asked to develop ―sensitizing concepts and integrated analytics‖ (p. 67). This is a very purposive move away from the original goal of grounded theory which tended to focus on discovering what was recurring in social situations- that is looking for patterns in data and building concepts and theories out of these patterns. As Clarke explains further: ―rather than focusing on commonalities, we can pursue directions and angles of vision that reveal difference(s) and complexities, heterogeneous positionings, including but not limited to differences in power in situations. The goals is not prediction but what Fosket (2002:40) called thick analysis‖ (p. 29).

This notion is relevant within this study which seeks to capture phenomena that may not be repeated throughout the data but should be recognized as important nonetheless. While all of these techniques have been applied to the analysis of the data for this project, what was most compelling in Clarke‘s presentation of situational analysis was her request that grounded theory researchers look at discourse as part of their work, and understand more about new identities and their meaning as part of the research process. As she explains: ―sites where individuals and

91 discourses meet and identities and subjectivities are produced will continue to elaborate and increasingly be sites of significance for qualitative researchers‖ (p. 160).

Map making occurs along with the more conventional modes of analysis including coding which is re-named as the creation of sensitizing concepts, and memo-ing of data which enables the researcher to create (and re-create) more maps as the research proceeds. Map making is central to this methodology and maps are made and re-made, either by hand or by computer (or both), throughout the research process. Maps are fundamental because as Clarke explains: ―we need to conceptually replace modernist unidimensional normal curves with post-modern multidimensional mappings in order to represent lived situations and the variety of positionalities and human and nonhuman activities and discourses with them. Otherwise we merely continue performing recursive classifications that ignore the empirical world‖ (p. 25).‖ Clarke‘s cartographic methodology underscores a fundamental epistemic goal of qualitative research which is to go beyond normal, predictive patternings (though not to ignore those themes and ideas that do tend to be held by more than one person or displayed in more than one element) into explorations and interpretations. With situational analysis, as researchers create maps, they contemplate the proximity of the various elements thereby considering the importance of this locationality.

Clarke‘s stated aim in the development of situational analysis is to take grounded theory ―around the post-modern turn.‖ As she further explains: ―I want to do a subversive reading of this criterion toward modifying the theory of grounded theory per se. I want to shift and augment the undergirding assumptions of grounded theory from positivist to postmodern, from Western scientific universalizing master narratives ‗explaining variation‘ to creating representations that basically assume differences and multiplicities and seek to explicitly map and represent them‖

(19). She is highly influenced by the works and methods of postmodern theorists, most particularly by Michel Foucault and Donna Haraway. As a result of these influences, part of situational analysis is the inclusion of discourse and other non-human elements (what Haraway would refer to as cyborgs, perhaps) as viable subjects of study. Ultimately it was the importance of ―going beyond the knowing subject‖, framed as such, that resonated in relation to this study as this ethic facilitated the opening up of new conceptual spaces with which to understand the OJS.

As Clarke explains in her discussion of why discourse analysis is so important to social research:

―there is a fundamental difference between analyzing interview and ethnographic field data and analyzing extant discourses. Historically, the social sciences have been predicated on ‗grasping the native‘s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world (Malinowski cited in Prior 1997, p. 64). That is for over a century, focus has been relentlessly on ―the knowing subject‖ in both quantitative and qualitative research‖ (p. 147). What I wanted to do in my study was, less to re-create the world of OJS developers as an ethnographer , like Kelty (2005) or

Coleman (2004), though the developers do in fact play a large role in this thesis, and more to understand the significance and symbolism of the OJS project – the situation of the OJS. My theorization of the DMORP is a function of my attempt to go beyond the knowing subject (that is to present the perspectives of participants), and construct a meso-level theory.

4.1.1 Previous situational analyses

Situational analysis, as conceived and elucidated by Clarke is a relatively new methodology. A search of academic databases for studies employing this methodology revealed no studies that used it the field of higher education or general educational studies. However, there were some recent studies that employed versions of the methodology within the field of nursing and political science. Mills, Francis and Bonner conduct a grounded theory study about rural nurses and

93 mentoring, using the mapping techniques of situational analysis (2007; Jane Mills, Francis, &

Bonner, 2007), while Rap uses ethnography combined with situational analysis to understand the implications of a political rally in Western Mexico (2007)

4.2 Description of the study

This research project is a situational analysis of the creation and distribution of the Open Journal

System- an open source software application developed at the Simon Fraser University (SFU) that is used to publish online peer reviewed journals. My aim in this analysis is to explore two main questions: in the first I would like to understand more about how universities and other academic institutions interact in digital academic space and the dynamics (i.e. the power relations and the resulting identities) of this interaction, to get a sense of what this it looks like, how it is constituted, and how it functions. The second question is more specific: it relates to how open source software development is carried out in academic environments, and seeks to learn more about those who participate in this process, the impact the academic context has on the evolution of the project, and the impact of the project on the academic environments involved

(i.e. impact of induction into the global knowledge network). My position is that open source software, as exemplified by the OJS, can inform the world of universities as well as the world of open source software. As a globally deployed open source software application, with strong roots to its local and national contexts, the OJS is poised to inform both of these scenarios.

The OJS has been downloaded (and in some cases modified) by hundreds of universities and academic institutions world-wide as a means of publishing and distributing their academic information. The software now houses 2000 journals from a range of different disciplines published in over thirty different languages (pkp.sfu.ca/community_contributions?q=ojs-

94 languages). As with other OSS projects, the OJS is characterized by a tight user/developer community which the core members of the OJS project team purposefully nurtured through their web site, through their timely responses to user questions, and most importantly, through their face to face contact with users. In July of 2007, the Simon Fraser University Library which houses the OJS (in conjunction with the University of British Columbia, and now Stanford

University) hosted a two day conference, in which users of the OJS from all over the world congregated to present their journals, discuss innovative uses of and future directions for the software, and teach users more about how to ameliorate and enhance their publishing projects.

Some of the data for this research project was gathered at the time of the conference in the form of face to face interviews with core members of the project as well as OJS users who were either involved in the re-development of the software code (the release of the second version, a total redesign of the software, was a pivotal moment in the evolution of the project), or were parts of larger multi-journal publishing projects (making them in a sense core users of the project). Table one below displays the demographic, geographic and professional roles of the face to face interview participants.

The thirteen face to face interviews were held the day before the conference and on breaks between sessions during the conference at Simon Fraser University. I recruited the interviewees via email. A few months prior to the conference, after receiving ethical consent from the

University of Toronto, I contacted members of the OJS project. After they agreed to participate, I sent them the interview protocol via email. Two of the people who agreed initially to participate in the project, and worked on the OJS and were employed by the SFU in other capacities declined to participate after seeing the interview protocol. They admitted that they felt that their work on the project was too peripheral to be of any significance to the research project, and that

95 they could not speak to the themes on the interview protocol. Three out of the twelve interviews were held in different locations: one at a nearby coffee shop, one in a conference room at the

University of British Columbia, and one over dinner the night before the conference. I secured written consent for all of these interviews, which I audio taped and transcribed.

Table 1 Face to Face Interview Participants Code Gender Profession Age Location Institution Role in OJS CMP1 M Developer 26 Canada PKP/SFU Key Developer CMP2 F Librarian +50 Canada SFU (FT) Administrator CMP3 M Professor + 50 Canada UBC/Stanford Creator CMP4 M Librarian +30 Canada PKP/SFU Implementor CMP5 M Developer 31 Canada PKP/SFU Developer CMP6 M Developer 27 Canada/ PKP/SFU Developer/ Latin implementor America CMP7 M Librarian 50 Canada SFU (FT) Administrator CMP8 M Librarian 40’s Canada SFU (FT) CU9 F Developer 28 South User-developer Africa CU10 M Developer 24 South AJOL User-developer Africa CU 11 F Publisher/coordinator 50 England INASP Implementor CU12 M Developer +30 Brazil IBICT User-developer CU13 F Librarian 30 Canada UBC Implementor

4.2.1 Detailed description of face to face interviews: Core members of the project

A fundamental characteristic of open source software projects is that the user/producer-developer relationship is much tighter and closer than in other user/producer relationships. Indeed, in the best case scenario, users of an open source software application are also developers, and vice versa, and it is this level of involvement in ‗production‘ or participation, for which open source software devotees strive. This was also important to the OJS develoeprs. However, at the same

96 time, there was a clear structure to the project- one that I would describe as an core circle, where there were members of the project, who were employed by the SFU, who were fundamental not only to its design and development, but also to its maintenance and distribution. I refer to these respondents as core members of the project (CMPs). The CMPs performed a variety of functions for the project, and while all of them were technically employed by the SFU (except for John

Willinsky who at the time was a professor at the UBC), because the project is housed there, only three of CMPs, CMP2, CMP7 and CMP8 were full time employees – librarians- at the SFU. As librarians by profession, CMP2 and CMP7 worked largely on the distribution, marketing, and implementation of the OJS, as opposed to the actual development of the software, while CMP8, also a librarian for the SFU originally became involved with the OJS after working on the redevelopment of its meta-data indexing tool for the Canadian Association of Research Libraries

(CARL).As full time employees of the SFU library, they all resided in Vancouver, British

Columbia. All of these respondents worked on a variety of different projects at the SFU library, and were not full time on the OJS.

The remaining CMP group of interview participants were deeply involved in the development and design of the software, spent most of their professional time on the OJS, and worked as developers of the software or fielded user questions and requests either via email or by overseeing the user support forums. One CMP, CMP4, also a librarian by profession, explained that he had little if any technical programming knowledge, and spent his time helping with the implementation of the OJS software by doing presentations at various universities around the world, and learning more about OJS users and the journals they created. Following the 2007 conference CMP4 created a blog about OJS in which he charts the progress and use of the software—something that is difficult to do with an open source software application since it is

97 free for anyone to use. CMP1, a software developer by trade, a graduate of the SFU who began working on smaller software project for the SFU library, and then eventually moved on to the

OJS, was considered by all of the other CMPs as the lead developer of the OJS software, while

CMP 5 and 6 who had joined the project more recently after working with a medical journal that used the software, also performed development duties. Interestingly, CMP4, 5 and 6 all lived outside of Vancouver and had never met CMP1 in person prior to the conference; up until this point all of their communication took place online. CMP4 had re-located to Thunder Bay from

Vancouver, CMP 5 lived in the Toronto area and was attending library school at the University of Toronto, while CMP 6 was from Ottawa but was travelling around Latin America working with publishers and universities on the implementation of the OJS.

Special mention must be made of one of our respondents – Prof. John Willinsky - who was the original creator of the OJS, and a major presence within the field of American and Canadian education. In participating in this research project, he had no expectations of being able to maintain his anonymity, and thus gave me permission to reveal his identity. Willinsky was a professor of language and literacy at the University of British Columbia, who in 1999 began to think about how to leverage the Internet to make academic research publicly available online.

His academic interests centered around post-colonial education and the epistemic implications of

―being post colonial‖. This scholarly interest is best seen in his work Learning to Divide the

World: Education at Empire‘s End (1998) in which he states:

For my part, I am not sure we have fully worked out how profoundly the Western

division of the world continues to hold the imagination in thrall, even as its sense of

racial and national boundaries make less and less sense within what are increasingly

global communities. In a similar manner, we need to pause over the role played by

nationalism as an affair of land, loyalty, identity and education, especially as it continues

to serve as an implicit disavowal of those from ―from away,‖ to use a Newfoundland

expression (133).

Over the course of his career he has looked at how various technologies have affected the organization of knowledge (such as, for example, the Oxford English Dictionary, viewing the concept of a dictionary as a technology), and the OJS grew out of these academic interests, along with interest in making ―public knowledge available to the public‖, so that the full benefits of social science research could be felt throughout society. As the OJS evolved (along with the

Internet), Willinsky‘s work became involved in advocacy for the Open Access movement, which began to grow and become formalized as the internet became a more ubiquitous medium within university environments. Beginning in 2007, following the conference, Willinsky ended his long career at the UBC and re-located to Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California. Stanford has now become a partner in the PKP project, although it is still housed largely at the SFU.

4.2.2 Core OJS users

The remaining face to face interviews were with users of OJS who were somehow involved with the software on a level that was greater than simply the publication of a journal. These users either had significant contact with the CMPs by, for example, helping with the re-development of some aspect of the software – such as with a translation, or were implementers of the software on a large scale; that is they used the software for many journals, or had helped others implement the software in a number of scenarios. These respondents have been designated as Core Users

(CUs). Table 2 displays a breakdown of these participants:

Table 2 Core OJS Users Code Gender Profession Age Location Org. Function/OJS CU9 F Developer 28 South Uni. South User-developer Africa Cappe CU10 M Developer 24 South AJOL User-developer Africa CU 11 F Publisher/coordinator 50 England INASP Implementor CU12 M Developer +30 Brazil IBICT user-developer CU13 F Librarian 30 Canada UBC Implementor

All of these respondents were recruited based on recommendations from CMPs. Three of the

CUs, CU9, 10 and 11, were involved in projects that were using the OJS to ramp up African publishing efforts. CUs 9 and 10 were developers from South Africa working actively on the current version of OJS and involved in other OSS, while CU11 was more of a coordinator concerned more with the Open Access implications of the OJS. Her work was not limited to

Africa or even solely the OJS. C12‘s involvement in OJS was, as he described it, very evolutionary. His profession was that of coordinator for the academic organization in Brasilia,

Brazil, and he eventually learned the programming language that the OJS was written in and transferred three of his organization‘s journals into the OJS. He also began working with other journals and academic organizations all over Brazil helping them create new journals using the

OJS. Ultimately, CU12 began the practice of contributing language plug-ins to the OJS when he contributed the Portuguese translation of the software. CU13 was a librarian from the UBC who was involved in her library‘s initiative to help academics and students create peer reviewed journals.

The thirteen face-to-face interviews were semi-structured conversational interviews, each about one hour long. The interviews began simply with an inquiry into what each participant‘s role in

100 the OJS project was, who they worked with the most on the project, how they worked with them

(i.e. did they communicate online over email? Did they work at the same institution?). I also asked them about their experience with open source software development, as well as about how supportive their institutional context was of their work with the OJS, if and how they worked with other institutions or organizations, and what they saw in the future for the software project, not only in terms of the design of the software, but also in terms of the human structure behind it.

Since the interviews were conversational they often branched off in a variety of directions.

4.3 Online and email interviews

The data for this research project also includes information from thirty two OJS users who responded to an open-ended questionnaire that I sent to them via email. A few of these users were PKP conference attendees who I recruited while at the PKP conference. Other email respondents were recommended by the CMPs and still others were contacted based on an aggregation of OJS journals listed on the PKP website (http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs-journals). At the time that the research was being conducted, there were over 1000 journals housed in the OJS software, a pivotal landmark for the project. Due to time and resource constraints however, it was difficult to survey all of the PKP users. Thus I created a strategy by which to select users that would be appropriate for the study. One criterion that was important was to solicit responses from users who were from a variety of geographical contexts so that responses would be globally distributed. Another important criterion was more practical and was based on communicating with users who were part of sustained publishing projects. That is, users needed to have published more than one journal issue, in a relatively recent amount of time. My reasoning was that the older the journal, the more issues published, the more users could speak about their experiences of using OJS. On the other hand, were too many limits about OJS users created the

101 full range of OJS experiences would be lost. As such, I did not stick hard and fast to a set of recruitment rules but rather used them as guidelines. Additionally, multi-volume journals with larger editorial boards became the preference. Part of this related as well to another factor in the creation of the recruiting strategy: the institutional context of the journals. Since this research hinged around the context of higher education, some of the survey questions related to the institutional support users felt they received. Responses from users who were affiliated with a post-secondary institute were therefore preferred.

Thirty two users of OJS responded to the email questionnaire where sixty were sent out. Some of these users were editors of single journals, some were technical coordinators or journal managers, and still some were coordinators of multi-volume online publishing initiatives at the university. Table 1.1.3 provides an overview of these respondents, including their role in relation to the journal, and their geographical and institutional contexts. I have separated the respondents from the journals they are associated with in order to maintain anonymity. The details of the journals, such as their language, their discipline or field, and whether they were previously printed journals, are contained in Table 3 ?

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Table 3 Overview of Email Interview Respondents

Code M/F Age Gen. Role Role Location Institution U1 M NA Coordinator Coordinator Canada University U2 M 47 Professor Editor France Research Institute U3 M +50 Librarian Coordinator U.S. University U4 F 43 Prof Editor Canada Association U5 M 43 Prof Editor Australia University U6 M 40 Prof Editor Hong Kong University U7 M 52 Prof. Editor U.S. University U8 F 51 Prof Editor Canada University U9 F NA Coordinator Ed. Asst. Philippines Research Institute U10 F 51 Coordinator Coordinator Australia Public library U11 M 42 Prof. Editor/manager Canada University U12 M 48 -- Chief editor Iran University U13 F NA Prof. Editor Canada College U14 F 45 Coordinator Coordinator Canada University U15 M 55 Prof. Chief editor U.S. University U16 M 32 Researcher Manager Austria University U17 F 54 Coordinator Editor Germany University U18 F 30 Curator Managing editor Singapore University U19 M 36 Professor Managing editor Greece University U20 F 30 Asst. Prof Managing editor Austria University U21 M 30 It manager Web manager Brazil Association U22 M 67 Professor Editor Canada University U23 M 42 Executive editor Executive editor India Association U24 M 64 Professor Manager, editor Australia University U25 M 62 Professor Managing editor Norway University U26 M 35 Post doctoral fellow Journal manager Germany University U27 M 62 Director (academic) Journal manager, West Indies University chief editor U28 M 46 Professor Journal manager U.S. University U29 M 34 Post doctoral fellow Managing editor Taiwan University U30 M 34 Managing editor Managing editor China University U31 M 47 Professor Editor Canada University U32 M 58 Professor Editor Canada University

4.3.1 Detailed description of email interview respondents

Out of the thirty two online interview respondents, twenty three respondents were men, and nine were women. Four of the female respondents were coordinators working on online publishing initiatives for their universities, four were professors, and the remaining female respondent was a curator working for a university. Out of all of the respondents, nineteen were professors who were also managing or editing their journals. Two of the respondents were full time journal

103 editors, three were researchers or post-doctoral fellows who were managing a journal in their field of study, one was a librarian who was managing three journals for his university, one was a director (and academic title) who was editing a journal in his field, and as mentioned above, four were coordinators of online publishing initiatives for their respective organizations. Only one of the respondents was a full time information technology manager for his organization- which is notable because it speaks to the amount of technical experience that the respondents possessed, as well as to the motivations of those people involved in the production of these journals.

The age distribution of the research sample was interesting. Every respondent was over the age of thirty, with four over sixty (all of whom were men), thirteen over the age of forty five, five between the ages of forty and forty five, and eight over the age of thirty. Three of the respondents did not contribute their precise ages, though one of them shared that he was in his fifties. Interestingly, the CMP group, particularly the developers, was considerably younger than the user respondents. This might be due to the fact that the majority of the respondents in the sample were academics with established careers interested in furthering the research in their fields by creating an online journal.

As intended, the online survey reached respondents who were globally distributed. Nine of the respondents were from Canada, four from the United States, and seven from Europe. Five of the respondents were from various parts of Asia including Singapore, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, and the Philippines, one was from India and one was from Iran. Of the remaining four respondents, two were from Australia, one form the West Indies, and one from Brazil. It should be mentioned that more responses were expected from Brazil due to the high use of the software in that region. Ultimately it is possible that since the survey was written in English, many editors did not feel able to adequately communicate via email.

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4.3.2 Description of the online surveys

The purpose of the online surveys was to understand more about OJS users as well as their experience with open source software. Part of the purpose was to corroborate, or compare and contrast users‘ ideas with those of the CMPs- to analyze their comments and notions alongside the discourses of the open source literature, and the discourses used by the CMPs. Not only was it important to find out more about their journal- such as whether it was created largely because there was this online tool that facilitated the process, or whether it existed prior to the use of the

OJS- such as in a print form, but it was important as well to understand the user‘s engagement with the software itself, and, in a sense, their beliefs and attitudes about open source software. It was therefore important to discover whether they had re-developed any part of the software code, whether they had communicated any of these re-developments back to the OJS, whether they encountered any difficulties using the software, and whether they had any experience dealing with the CMPs. It was also necessary to know more about users‘ interaction with each other, and whether as a result of their use of the OJS they felt they were part of a larger community. Finally,

I wanted to learn about how users heard about the software- whether they discovered it as a result of their use of other open source software applications, after having searched online for a publishing system (open source or not), whether their own institution promoted it, or whether they had met with a member of the OJS team at a presentation (many had actually met Willinsky at conferences) and been involved with the software as a result of this meeting.

4.4 Analysis of journals

This research project also involves the analysis of those journals associated with the user participants listed above because these journals form a part of the situation that is being

105 described. While there are thirty two user participants involved in this study, there are thirty five journals involved in this analysis since some users, mainly the coordinators, were connected to more than journal. Table 3 displays an overview of the journals analyzed in this study with information regarding each journal‘s associated name and URL, discipline, language of publication, point of origin, and whether they existed in any other format prior to the OJS iteration, or whether they were created within OJS. As can be expected based on the sample of user participants involved in the study, the points of origins of the journals was generally diverse.

Eleven were based in Canada, seven in Europe, four from the U.S and five from Asia. One of the journals was considered a joint partnership between the U.S. and Hong Kong. Five of the journals originated in Australia, one from Iran, one from the West Indies, and last of all, one from Brazil.

The journals in this sample came from a wide range of disciplines. The majority, fourteen, of the journals fell into what can be described as the social sciences with a specific focus on education, six of the journals were from field of cultural studies, three from medicine, two from agricultural development, two from mathematics and information technology, one each from the field of political science, psychology, design, leisure studies, and library studies (or archiving). It should be noted that these classifications were not identified by the journals themselves, but were rather based on my own determination of what field they fell into. In terms of the validity of the sample of the types of journals the software houses: the OJS initially was geared towards publishing in the social sciences, since this was the field within which Willinsky, the originator of the software worked. This explains why a great number of OJS journals are from the social sciences.

However, subsequent versions of the OJS catered to journals in the sciences and in medicine as users donated plug-ins that enabled the software to be indexed by medical databases, such as the

106 open access database Pubmed.com. In fact, it could be argued that greater inroads in the success of open access have been made in the sciences overall, which explains the presence of medical and scientific journals in the OJS in the first place. For OJS to compete as a viable option for publishing online, it needed to work as a solution for medical and scientific journals. The high representation of social sciences in the sample make sense, however, it is fair to say that journals from medicine and the sciences (such as agricultural and biological sciences) are under- represented. The goal in this research project was not necessarily to subscribe to a logic of representation in the sample of responses that would imitate that of ―reality‖- that is the real distribution of journals by discipline, but rather to receive a broad array of responses so as to understand the situation, with all of its elements and discourses, at hand.

The last few characteristics important to a description of the journals is their status as open access, whether they are peer-reviewed, as well as whether these journals existed prior to being

‗OJS journals‘. All of the journals are currently open access even though the OJS is capable of being subscription based (that is closed to those who do not own a subscription) as there is a subscription plug-in. Sixteen of the journals existed prior to their iteration as OJS journals, all of which were closed access. In their move to OJS, the editors chose to go open access. The nineteen remaining journals were created in OJS. Of those newer journals, some were created based on the needs of the field (i.e. a lack of information, there was no proper venue to publish in the area), while some were created as side projects for a professor or an editor, in some cases where those involved were interested in seeing what the software could manage.

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Table 4 Overview of Journals

Name Discipline Lang Origin Previous Age OA

Inter. J. of Agriculture and Agricul. Eng. Eng China PrPrint Y biological engineering

Inter. J. Zizek Studies Phil/Cult. Stud Eng U.S. No 1 Y

New Proposals: J. of Phil/Cult. Eng. Can No 3 Y Marxism and Stu fre/ Spa Interdisciplinary Inquiry

Forum for Qualitative Social sciences Germ/ Germ Online 8 Y Social Research Eng

Australasian Journal of Cult. Stud/ Eng Aust. Print 13 Y Victorian Studies Literature

J. of the Assn. Study of Literature Eng Aust Ann. Print ? Y Australian Lit.

Reviews in Australian Cultural Studies Eng Australia No 1 Y Studies

Inter. J. Edu. Pol. Lead Social sciences Eng Canada No 2 Y

Journal Research in Medicine Eng Iran Yes 11 Y Medical Science

Postcolonial Text Cultural Studies Eng Canada No 4 Y

Institute for European Political Science Germ Austria Online 10 Y Integration Research

The Heritage Journal Art history Eng Sing. Print 31 Y

Hellenic Open University Information Greek Greece No 1 Y Journal of Informatics technology

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Name Discipline Lang Origin Previous Age OA

Journal of Travel and Leisure Studies English Austria Print 7 Y Tourism

Wildlife Biology in Zoology/ Sciences Portugu Brazil No 4 Y Practice ese

Transnational Curriculum Education/ Social English Australia No 4 Y Inquiry sciences

International Journal of Social/Political English Norway No 2 Y the Commons Science

Intl. J. Of Dream Research Psychology English Germany No 1 Y

Intl. J. Of Dev. Using ICTs Education English West No 3 Y Indies

International J. Of Design Design (Arts) English Taiwan No 2 Y

Ameriquests Cultural Studies English U.S. No 3 Y

Archivaria Archiving English Canada Print 27 Not and fully French

Cosmos and History Philosophy English Australia No 3 Y

Electronic J. Inform. Social English Hong No 8 Y Systems in Dev. Countries Sciences/interdiscip Kong/US linary

Radiology Case Report Medicine English U.S. No 2 Y

Child and Health Education English Canada No Y Education

International Rice Development/agric English Philippines Print Y Research Notes ulture

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Name Discipline Lang Origin Previous Age OA

Discrete Mathematics and Mathematics English France Online 11 Y Theoretical Computing

J. Applied Clinical Medical Medicine English U.S. Online 8 Y Physics

Journal of Research Social Sciences English Canada No 4 Y Practice

Labour/ Le Travail Social Sciences English Canada Print 32 Y and French

Intl. Review research in Education/SS English Canada No 4 Y Open & Distance Learning

Trumpeter: Journal of Social Sciences English Canada Print 25 Y Ecosophy

Journal of Distance Education/Social English Canada Print 12 Y Education/Revue de science and L’education a Distance French

McGill Journal of Education English Canada Print 43 Y Education and French

4.4.1 Creating a strategy for capturing journal information

As a way of ―going beyond the knowing participant‖ I decided to include the journals as entities within the study. I was therefore faced with the task of deciding how to include their information.

Each OJS journal is configured in a typical way: they have homepages containing a brief description of the journal‘s scope as well as a table of contents. Along the upper part of the

110 homepage is menu of options allowing readers to enter into the journal. One such menu option contains information about the journal: a more detailed description of the ‗focus and scope‘ of the journal, editorial and editorial board information, and information about submissions policies, peer review and sponsors (this varies depending on the version of OJS in use, but most journals in this study had upgraded to version 2.0). Since it was not to analyze the contents of each journal, I decided to examine the focus and scope of each journal, as well as the contents of the homepage, leaving out the table of contents of the current issues. In some cases the contents of each were one and the same, and in some cases, they contained less information. In these cases, I included information from other areas of the journal was included as a way of compensating- such as from the information about editorial boards and editors, or even a brief glance at the papers published. However overall, the focus and scope and descriptions of the journal provided substantial subject matter for analysis in this study.

Finally, in addition to the face to face and email interviews, and the information from the journals, the data for this project includes information located on the Internet about the OJS and the Public Knowledge Project. This information includes blog posts from the PKP blog

(http://pkp.sfu.ca/blog), from the user forums (http://pkp.sfu.ca/support/forum/), and from the

PKP web site in general.

4.5 Mapping, sensitizing concepts, memo-ing, discourse analysis

Situational analysis involves a number of processes. The first is to become acquainted with the data through an initial process of coding and memo-ing for themes. In this process, however, themes are not defined as ideas that recur within the data, but are rather as ―the creation of sensitizing concepts‖(p. 28) which Clarke sees, not as concepts which will direct the act of

111 creating a theory (which often tends to turn ideas in static abstractions), but rather as a way of locating important issues and opportunities for analysis, without pinning them down into overgeneralizations. Within my study, the idea of obtaining „freedom through public information‟, a powerful statement made by one of the developers regarding the OJS project, became a sensitizing concept within the constellations of concepts that framed the social world of the core developers. Other examples of sensitizing concepts include ‗local customizations‟ used in the analysis of the software users, the concept of ‗global development‟ as deployed by

OJS users and developers and their journal description, the idea of ‗community‘ employed by both users and developers, references to interdisciplinarity in journal descriptions, and the notion of ‗participation and contributions‟ made by members of the project. Sensitizing concepts, some of which are very obvious and some of which were hidden, helped to re-build the situation of inquiry for the purpose of analysis. Mining sensitizing concepts and memo-ing their importance was the first step in my analytical process.

Following the creation of sensitizing concepts was the act of reconstructing the situation of inquiry by means of the creation of multiple maps. As a guideline for this process, Clarke recommends creating three different maps: 1) situational map, 2) a social worlds/arena maps; and

3) a positional map, an exercise I found to be incredibly valuable. At the same time, these maps, and Clarke emphasizes that this is the case, are crudely drawn sketches that begin haphazard and then via iteration after iteration become more strategic so that they begin to resemble columns and graphs. In other words, they do not resemble traditional maps. Within this research study, I began by placing one large element of the research project in the centre, and placing other elements around them. Thus, in one map, the OJS was central, while relevant elements including actors- the SFU librarians and developers, discourses such as ‗free information‘ and ‗open access

112 to information‘, and technologies, for example, open source software, and non-human agents such as journals, radiated around the OJS. In another map, open source software was placed at the centre, while other elements radiated around it. These elements included the cultural practice of networked collaboration, the software developers who worked on the OJS who believed in free information and flexible working conditions, the discourses associated with these elements such as the slogan ―information wants to be free‖, and of course, more. In yet another map, the social worlds of core developers was drawn, with John Willinsky and Core developer 1 at the centre, while elements such as open source software, the Synergies grant, the PKP/OJS system and the conference, the notion of ―geekiness‖, flexible employment, and other attributes radiated around them. This is how the mapmaking, so integral to this methodology, took place within this research study. Over the course of the analysis multitudes of maps were drawn initially with paper and pen, and as they began to take shape, via a computerized program within the qualitative research software Nvivo.

4.5.1 Use of Nvivo

In order to facilitate the process of locating sensitizing concepts and creating situational maps to understand the situation of inquiry, I employed the qualitative research software application

Nvivo, version 8. Nvivo automates the process of coding and memoing, allows users to run text based queries on the data, and enables the creation of visual maps and models. Once all the face to face interviews were transcribed, I imported them into Nvivo and coded them, looking for themes, concepts and ideas that related to theoretical framework and the research questions. Each interview respondent became what is called in the language of Nvivo a ‗case‘ with ‗properties‘, such as their demographic information or their institutional affiliations, were assigned to each case. As I received responses to the online questionnaire, I created a code name for each

113 respondent and imported the survey into Nvivo. Again, each respondent became a case, and properties were assigned to each of them. The journals involved in this project were treated as cases as well, and assigned with descriptive properties- such as the age and language of the journal, and whether it had existed prior to its OJS version.

4.6 Limitations

The limitations of this research study revolve around the sample size of participants involved in the study, the passage of time, the language in which the questionnaire was written since for some respondents, English was not their first language. At the time that this research was conducted, according the PKP/OJS team, the software was being used to publish one thousand journals. While this meant that there were not necessarily one thousand different users, there was a user base that was substantial and, more importantly, this user base was growing quickly. As it was growing, the organization of the core developers who were involved in the production of the software, and the design and release of version 2.0, was also shifting. This qualitative research study involves consists of semi-structured interviews with all of the core developers who were working on the PKP/OJS in 2007, as well as email interviews from 30 user respondents, only a fraction of the OJS users today. While all of the core developers involved in this project are still employed by the SFU and PKP, the project has also engaged new developers and designers not included in this study. In terms of the OJS users, not only is the size of the sample group limiting, but so was the language of the email interviews. These interviews were conducted in

English. While the users were not troubled by responding to the research questions in English, for many, English was not their first language (indeed, some asked for their grammar and spelling to be corrected if made public). Thus sample size and language are both limiting factors.

The passage of time is also a limiting factor. This is particularly true within the world of

114 information technology. The data for this research project was collected in 2007, and since then the PKP project has undergone many changes and shifted in different directions. At the same time, it is argued that this research study is meant to serve as a snapshot of the project, that despite growth and changes remains to be a valuable source of knowledge about the academic activities in cyberspace.

The last limiting factor within this research study relates to the methodology of situational analysis. I chose this method because of how it allowed me to integrate many elements, formally, into the research process including, such as non-human elements (technological elements). Since this project is about what I am calling digital academic space, which is partially embodied and partially discursive, I felt it important to select a method of analysis that both allowed for the inclusion of traditional methods along with more recent forms of discourse analysis. Situational analysis serves as a practical integration of these two epistemological positions. It is limiting however because, originating within the field of epidemiology and the sociology of health, there were no examples to follow from within the field of education. Therefore, my use of the situational analysis methodology within this research study is to some degree based on interpretation and is only an example of a version of Clarke‘s methodology.

4.7 Conclusion

Changes to information dissemination have impacted upon the processes, practices and roles of universities throughout the world. This claim is often repeated throughout both the academic and popular literatures in describing contemporary higher education, and while both true and interesting, it does not capture some of the more methodologically challenging issues associated with university activities on the Internet. This research study of academic open source software

115 seeks to move beyond common analytical techniques and frameworks to look for new stories and situations that are still empirically based. The method of situational analysis, though new to the field of higher education, combined with a theoretical framework that includes media theory, facilitates this goal.

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Figure 6. Screenshot of the OJS journal Scientific Journal of the Postgraduate Program in Communication Sciences of the University of São Paulo.

MATRIZes is the biannual journal of the Postgraduate Program in Communication Sciences of University of São Paulo, Brazil. It obtained B1 concept, the highest among scientific publications in Communication field in Brazil. The concept is established by evaluation indicators created by CAPES, agency of Brazilian Ministry Education that is responsible for postgraduate politics. The journal accepts theoretical works and results from research concerning the Communication area, besides book reviews. (translated from its original in Portuguese)

From About the Journal, Matrizes, http://citrus.uspnet.usp.br/matrizes/ojs/index.php/matrizes/about.

Chapter 5: Anchoring Institutional Identities: The Role of Open Source Software in Establishing Institutional Identities

5.1 From OJS to DMORPs

In this research project my goal is to understand more about open source software projects developed in academic environments – their meso-level significance- by looking closely at the development and dissemination of one open source software project—the OJS, developed at

SFU and disseminated world-wide. My intention in this research study was to investigate the relevance and importance of new academic virtual spaces that open source software projects, being examples of networked information technologies, and to situate these ideas within the context of current theories of higher education.

The argument that I put forth here, is that there is a new organizational entity that is emerging as a result of the growth of the Internet within universities. This entity, which is referred to here as

Digitally Mediated Open Research Projects (DMORPs), are partly embodied and partly discursive and cut through and across several strata of the university, both in terms of the people and the organizational units involved in the project, creating new identities and spaces in the university. As I shall show, DMORPs eschew conventional notions of academic status, hierarchy and function and are in many cases a rogue activity that develops off the radar of university policymakers and administrators. As they evolve, however, they begin to serve the university‘s

―condition of publicity‖(McLennan, et al., 2005b) and may later be taken up by more official academic levels. Most important about these projects however is their direction: while they may

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118 begin as a result of the academic or research interests of their creator for example, they evolve to serve another purpose- to facilitate university involvement in global development through academic knowledge production. A more detailed picture of DMORPs unfolds over the course of the next few chapters based on my analysis of the OJS project.

5.2 Three narratives of digital academic space

I constructed three storylines based on a situational analysis of my research data. Each constitutes an analytical chapter of this research project, and contributes to a portrait of the emerging sphere of activity I have named Digitally Mediated Open Research Projects

(DMORPs). The first storyline describes the importance of SFU within the development and progress of the OJS, and how the OJS, reciprocally, impacted upon the university. The second looks specifically at the developers and core members of the OJS project team in terms of their identities and motivations - both personal and professional. It looks, as well, at the details of how they work – their histories with the project, how they communicate with one another, how the crux of their time is spent, and how ‗distributed‘ they are. In this storyline I try to understand more about how open source software functions on the procedural level, to document an overlooked and understudied set of professionals that are currently populating contemporary universities, and to theorize the role of this group within DMORPs. In the third storyline I look at the journals that the OJS produces, and concentrate on the users of the software, their relationship to each other, and the benefits derived from their involvement in the OJS. Here I look at the journals produced by the software, and explore the possible epistemological impact of the OJS. The three analytical chapters of this research project will ultimately result in a portrait of DMORPs and their importance and impact in higher education.

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As I described in my discussion about the literature of open source software, the institutional situation has not been considered an important factor within discussions about open source software development. Instead, researchers have focused ethnographically on the developers themselves. I believe this is because researchers assume that open source software project members are globally distributed throughout various institutional and organizational situations.

That is not the case, however with the OJS where as I shall show there is a very clear project structure and core development team. The core developers and team members are all affiliated with, if not employed directly by SFU, and it is the university, and more specifically the parameters of the OJS project, that come through as a major factor in what the project members deem to be its success. In this chapter I show how the SFU, as the main institution affiliated with the OJS, was positioned as a university that was willing to take risks, and was an institution that, because of its involvement, in open source software projects and the OJS was seen as forward looking not hampered by unnecessary bureaucratic obstacles. My goal here is to show how

DMORPs can operate in the construction of a university‘s reputation as reputation becomes increasingly important for contemporary universities.

5.2.1 OJS: A „successful‟ open source software project

The core members of the project often referred to OJS as a ‗successful‘ open source software project. I thought this was interesting because of how it echoes the name of Weber‘s major research study on open source software which is titled The Success of Open Source (2004).The core OJS project members did not display any dissatisfaction towards the OJS project. They all believed that the project would continue to develop, gain users, and have a stable future. The core users displayed universal buy-in about its value not only in academia but in relation to the development of the internet as well. Because the project‘s ‗success‘ was raised by the core

120 members of the project themselves within our conversations, the idea of its success is taken up here is a tool to explore the OJS project, and to introduce the project‘s characteristics and larger meaning. That is, as I describe what they meant by success and in so doing, describe the project itself.

There are a number of ways by which to judge whether or not a piece of software, closed source or open source, is considered a ‗success‘. One is by looking at the number of installations, in this case how many institutions are using the software, and whether these installations are concentrated in one area of the world or whether they are widely distributed. In 2006, one user posted this question to the online OJS user forum, and a PKP developer explained that he knew of ―five hundred PKP journals with more appearing everyday‖. It is difficult to establish exactly how many institutions are using the OJS because the software is open source and users are not required to divulge their use of the software. Later versions of the software provided the ability for users to register their journal with the PKP web site. The meta-data harvester, an online tool that collects meta-information about journal articles (i.e. the author‘s name, field of study, the title of the paper, key words, the language in which the article is written- so that researchers may find the article in databases) also provides a sense of how many users are on the system. At the time of the PKP conference in July of 2007, Willinsky reported that there were over one thousand journals using the PKP/OJS software, in 2008, CMP3 reported in a personal email that the number of journals doubled. Finally, in 2009 another member of the OJS team who was conducting research on OJS users reported that there were 5000 journals on the system.

Ultimately, however, the number of OJS journals that exists only points to how many users are on the software (and presumably how many users are generally satisfied with the software). This

121 metric does not necessarily indicate how successful the PKP/OJS software is as an open source software project.

5.2.2 Success as the cultivation of OJS user-producers

The success of an open source software project, according to members of the OJS, is established by looking not only at the size of its community and the involvement of users in the production of the software. As CMP6 states: ―right now at least, and for the last year, the PKP community has been very active in both development and in use. Those things are the kinds of things that make the project successful‖. According to the OJS software developers, a successful open source project has an active user community that not only downloads and installs the software, but also reciprocates by providing add-ons, plug-ins, and what are referred to as ‗patches‘ for the system. Thus it is not simply about numbers. This is important because it displays the values of the developers who wished primarily for their users to feel ―empowered‖ (CMP4) by the software. Evidence of this active user community for the OJS has come largely in the form of language contributions from users all around the world. When it was first released, the OJS was available only in English – which meant that while the actual text of journal articles could be published in any language (users upload their own Word documents and PDFs, while the OJS system acts as a shell or container to organize and tag the papers), all of the menus, including the help menus and meta-data were in English. The OJS team released a French/English version, and subsequently a group of users from the Brazil‘s Institute of Science and Technology (IBICT), which supports a full open access policy, released a Portuguese version the software. The OJS is currently fully translated into over ten languages, including right to left languages such as Farsi and Hebrew, with more translation modules being developed (for a list of OJS language installs please go to: pkp.sfu.ca/ojs-languages). The majority of these translations were contributions

122 from users, and these contributions reflect its active and engaged OJS user community. As

CMP7 explains:

[I]n the case of the OJS software, that sort of spontaneous development or contributions

have actually been in different language versions. It‘s really incredible if you look at all

the different versions that OJS supports; they have literally been done by enthusiastic

users who say ‗you know this is great software, how can we contribute and make it in our

own localized language or whatever?‘ We probably have the stranglehold on Catalan

language publications because we had some very enthusiastic user of OJS that‘s using it.

For the OJS core members these contributions were significant not only because they represented an active user community, but also because they contribute to the localization of the software, an important goal within the vision of the OJS project. This characteristic also entrenched the software‘s value in the world of online publishing. As CMP1 states: ―every time I get a new language, seeing OJS in a Cyrilic alphabet for the first time was wild. I love seeing it in different languages‖. OJS developers felt a strong sense of enthusiasm towards user code contributions, and were eager as well to participate in the development of a multi-lingual web.

It was also clear from conversations with developers that user contributions to the development of the software are highly appreciated by the core members of the project. In fact, the OJS developers went to great lengths to encourage users to become ‗user-developers‘ and make these contributions by re-designing how the software was initially built. The first version of the OJS software was built as one large system which made it much harder for user-developers to make contributions. After a few years, as more users adopted the system the OJS was re-designed to follow a ‗plug-in architecture‘. CMP1 explains how he felt about re-designing the software:

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[I]t‘s got to be written in a way that makes it easy for people to contribute. And that was

one thing even initially when we got involved that probably wasn‘t like what you‘d call a

‗plug in architecture‘, which makes it very easy for somebody to write a little piece of

code and have it essentially be plugged in quite easily to the main part of the software,

and also in a way that, if it‘s not very good code, you don‘t have to use it. (CMP1)

While OJS has always been open source, meaning that code contributions from users-developers have always been part of the larger vision of how the project operates, the project only really became participatory in the way that is connected to open source projects when the system was re-designed as a plug-in architecture. Thus it is clear that an important element in a successful open source software design, according to the OJS developers, is that code contributions need to be fostered and encouraged on the design level.

While language translations were a large part of the contributions made by users to the development of the software, and highly valued and encouraged by developers, they were not the only types of contributions made to the project. The OJS website lists several other types of user contributions, including a subscription module enabling journal managers to close access to their journals (a very large contribution which in fact helped solidify the early partnership between

SFU and the PKP), to icons and images used throughout the back end of the system, and add-ons that help editors and authors manage citations and references.

Software support to users is another indication of a successful open source software project.

Most open source software projects employ various asynchronous communication tools such as listservs, weblogs and public forums to facilitate support, however in many cases such support ends up being thin. The reason for this is often that it either takes too long for a developer to

124 respond to a question, or because the tone of the developer‘s response is unwelcoming. The PKP team made great use of user forums to help answer the questions that their users posed, and OJS users cited the forum as their main source of support. The forums were where users would post questions about all aspects of the software, from technical questions about installation to more generalized questions about the social aspects of the software such as which groups uses it, and how to get involved in the project. One of the core developers explained that he was hired by the

OJS team after becoming more and more involved in the software‘s development via the forums.

As he states: ―they had the support forum, and that was how I met (the former lead developer), and CMP3, and I was involved then, and I put a lot of effort into being more and more involved and try to find ways to collaborate with them, and officially started with them, I guess last summer‖ (CMP5). The importance of the forums arose in conversation with both CMPs and users as the main mode of communication within the PKP/OJS community. As the lead developer CMP1 states: ―at the end what people use most is the support forum ... I do spend a lot of time answering questions on the forum and I do get the same questions, numerous times, sometimes because people don‘t know what they are talking about ...‖. The developer described spending time on the forums because he recognized their value to the project. For this reason, as he explains, ―one thing I have been careful to do that, I think, that has been improved upon that the other developers didn‘t do is to maintain a really friendly air on the support forums‖ thus comprehending the need for the project encourage an image of open and friendly dialogue on the user forums. Other core members acknowledged the importance of an active online forum as well. As CU13, a librarian-user at the UBC states:

Yeah well thank God that [the forums] are there because that‘s where I sort of would

direct people if they have problems or anything. That‘s one of the things that make it so

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nice for us. I‘ll look at it a little bit if I run into a problem or somebody tells me they‘ve

had a problem, I‘ll go and search the forums right away so I think that it‘s great that they

exist.

Active and open user forums contribute to the characterization of the PKP/OJS as a ‗successful‘ open source software project since user support is a major part of the experience of using software. The majority of the respondents in this research study mentioned the support forums as their main mode of communication around the OJS.

Thus far I have emphasized how the OJS team intentionally cultivated the user-developer typology (a user who becomes involved in the development of the software), to use sociologist

Castells‘ language, and offered this up as evidence of the project‘s success. At the same time, however, a successful open source software project is characterized by a strong leader or group of leaders, agents, who can forecast and manage project decision making and resources for the project so that the design and direction of the software remains on a sustainable track.

Throughout the interviews with the PKP/OJS team, as well as with many of the online interviewees, many references were made describing the leadership capabilities and vision of two key players: the lead developer, and the creator of the software, John Willinsky. As a library administrator and core member of the project explains:

There‘s a core here that‘s responsible for it, and if you want to look at any sort of success

of an open source project, in fact probably an interesting research topic there, to the

extent that they almost behave in terms of pack behaviours, where you probably have a

few alpha members of the pack, even if they‘ve got dozens or hundreds of contributors.

There‘s a few key players who are basically the ones that have the final word, and very

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kind of loose and openly everybody is contributing code. But you know there are few

people that if they say yes, it‘ll happen, if they say no, it‘ll never happen. It‘s a much

more almost primitive or basic organizational dynamic. (CMP7)

While the PKP/OJS project was populated by people with a variety of different institutional and positional affiliations, some of whom worked on the project largely as a sideline to their regular duties, there was a stable and obvious centre where decisions were made and future pathways carved out. All core members of the team respected this centre. This is because, according to participants, the two main project leaders, particularly the technical lead, fostered a strong sense of collegiality between core members of the project. As one developer describes, the lead developer is quick to give credit to others. He explains:

[Its] little things, like after I made a few small contributions, he put me as a credit on the

OJS website. It‘s a small thing…it‘s not like I placed a lot of importance on it, I didn‘t

really care for the recognition but it was a nice thing that he does to make people feel like

they‘re part of the development community which in an open source project is really

important. (CMP6)

Participants also described a respectful relationship between the two main players, both male, in the project, this despite the fact that one of the project leaders is a full professor with a large amount of social capital within the university, the other a contractually employed developer, without an advanced degree. As CMP7 states:

It‘s always interesting to watch the dynamics between those two fellows

because…they‘re both very good…I mean Willinsky will defer to CMP1 on things that

are…you know CMP1 says no, that‘s really a bad idea, it isn‘t going to work, we need to

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do it this way, Willinsky defers but at the same time it‘s Willinsky that calls the shots in a

lot of those in terms of where it‘s going.

As the research participants described it, the OJS project is distinct from other open source software projects for having overcome a major obstacle within the open source software development model: the project has managed to maintain a strong core leadership and sense of direction while also cultivating a vibrant user community - indeed making this latter aspect more and more of a priority over time. Interestingly, PKP core team members were conscious of the issues that other open source projects faced in terms of relationship building, as exhibited in the debate between Stallman and Raymond, and their statements point not only to their satisfaction with the PKP/OJS leadership, but also to a developed vision of an open source software project.

In many cases when members of open source software projects disagree, the project ‗forks‘: the development teams split and go their separate ways. However since there was an existing underlying organizational structure to the project, the risk of that occurring was minimal.

The well managed character of the OJS project, according to participants, can be connected to the university context in which it was developed, which provided a sense of stability and collegiality not present in other organizational situations. According to participants, the university context supplied many conditions and elements which facilitated the successful development of the OJS. As one participant explains:

[U]niversities are pretty formidable organizations in terms of the fact that there‘s a lot of

money, there‘s a lot of organizational strength behind them, there‘s a lot of kind of bright,

dedicated, full time people who get salaries to do things but can also be afforded the

luxury of having a couple of side projects underway all the time. (CMP7)

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The university context also drove the software‘s purpose and function, as well as the types of users, themselves mostly members of universities, who were drawn to the software. However as

CMP7 explains above, it is not necessarily the traditional core values of the university that contributed to success, but rather the employment conditions of those working within the university. These conditions, as far as the OJS team was concerned, contributed to the success of the project.

One last indication of the project‘s success as posited by the members of the OJS team is the technical documentation for the software project. Documentation, which refers to all of the documents developed for users aimed at supporting the installation and use of the software, and importantly, its re-development, is often the most onerous of all tasks associated with the development of a piece of software; it is also the least creative (and therefore ‗glamorous‘) of the tasks relating to the development of software. The OJS project web site contains a list of several documents that were created to help users, and user-developers, and nearly all of the users interviewed in this research project referred to ‗OJS in an Hour‘, a web based instruction manual that describes step-by-step how to install the OJS, when describing how they installed the software on their servers. At this point, the OJS documentation portfolio includes not only the basic installation instructions, but also various forms of media that show users how to customize the software for their own purposes (several faculty members at various universities are now using it to manage their courses), as well as how to import and export information which is a very significant part of publishing journals (pkp.sfu.ca/ojs_documentation).

Thus far, the reasons behind why the OJS project members consider the OJS ―a successful open source software project‖, have been presented. These reasons include: evidence of an interested and involved user community, comments from core members describing the project‘s leadership,

129 and the project‘s relatively extensive portfolio of supporting documents. What follows is an oral history of the OJS project which describes how it was taken on as a project by the SFU library, the role and impact of the SFU in its evolution and dissemination, and the project‘s impact, according to core members, on the reputation of the SFU.

5.2.3 Oral history of the PKP/OJS

The first version of the OJS was launched in 2001 out of the University of British Columbia‘s faculty of Education. The project began unofficially in 1998 when Professor John Willinsky, a professor of language and literacy at UBC was seeking ways to use the Internet to provide greater access to publicly funded research, as well as to increase the connections between different knowledge producing organizations, for example between newspapers and academic institutions. To this end, Willinsky enlisted the help of a web development organization, as well as some students, to build a web site that would facilitate making connections between scholarly papers, available online, and information available through other media formats. The result was a basic HTML website entitled the Education Exchange (Ed Ex) which provided links to (and between) different forms of knowledge and information in the field of education, such as government policy reports, scholarly papers and newspaper articles1.

Willinsky soon began a follow up to this initial web based knowledge experiment with what would become the OJS. It is also known more generally as the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), which is essentially the larger umbrella project that includes not only the OJS publishing system, but also all of the research activities and additional pieces of software that either accompany the

1 In 1998, while a student at the UBC, I worked with Willinsky to develop the Education Exchange web site. I helped catalogue and index the documents that the EdEx web site collected and connected to, and worked with Willinsky and a number of other students on the creation of a core meta-data schema. In 1999 I was no longer a student at the UBC, and I therefore did not contribute to the development of the OJS.

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OJS or were generated from its creation. In 1999, Willinsky applied for a grant from the

Macarthur Foundation and explained the purpose of the PKP. As he writes:

Considerable research will need to go into the design of a meeting place, a commons or

public space, for policy makers, researchers and the public which would seek to improve

how this knowledge works with what people know, need to know, and may need to

know. The possibility here is for greater engagement among researchers, practitioners,

policy officials, and public around the nature of knowledge‘s public and professional

contribution. The Public Knowledge Project will experiment with the design of such

public spaces and use those designs to research how, for example, researchers and policy

makers can literally link their related work, among issues and across domains and

disciplines. The possibilities of bringing different orders of knowledge and experience,

reflection and action, into inspiring points of proximity is certainly part of the promise of

these new technologies and needs to be pushed and tested as such.

The PKP is essentially an educational experiment born out of Willinsky‘s own scholarship in literacy and technologies of knowledge dissemination, and his recognition of the possibilities that the Internet could provide in service of these two elements. In the end, Willinsky built a tool that would provide knowledge creators with the ability to disseminate their own research, and, via the PKP Harvester, make connections between the research. Moreover, his work would end up providing knowledge creators with the ability to surmount one of the greatest obstacles standing in the way of public knowledge: the large commercial publishers.

Originally, the OJS was a UBC project that was a part of Willinsky‘s own scholarly pursuits. He explains that while he was building the system, he was not initially going to make it an open

131 source system- in fact, he admits that he had never even heard of open source software development- but that employing students as the software developers was the element that took the project in that direction. As he states:

The breakthrough critical factor was the involvement of undergraduate students. My

ability to employ them because they were economical and their cutting edge knowledge

of software development of which I knew nothing so I hired them to do something, it‘s

not as if I hired them to build a specific thing that I understood. I hired them to do

something and they educated me about what could be done so what we set out to build

was just a demonstration, a toy Model car and we ended up building a car that we could

give away to people. So they repeatedly taught me about the meaning of open source [...],

they taught me about how we could set up work flows, how we could set up the options,

how we could make a record in complete.

An important part of the story of the PKP/OJS is its origins; that what is now a ―successful‖ open source software project, a project that exemplifies some of the strongest characteristics of the open source software development process, was not originally meant to be open source, and that the reason why it did become an open source project was intimately tied with the context in which the project was developed. Willinsky makes clear that his access to computer science students affected the design and direction of the software (this is what he means when he refers to ‗workflows‘), and of course the decision to go open source. The first official version of the

OJS (software projects are versioned- which means that once one is released developers keep working on it and modifying it as users report bugs or problems) was released under a standard open source General Public License in 2001. Over the course of time, Willinsky and his student developers and researchers also released the Open Conference System (OCS) an open source

132 software system for the purpose of managing and publishing conference papers, and importantly, what is called the meta-data harvester, a tool which indexes and connects all of the journals and conferences published by the two systems.

Interestingly, however, as more journals were being housed in the OJS, the employment of students as developers became more of a burden than a value for Willinsky. As he explains:

It was limited, I only ever had them part time, I was having to do two and three roles, one

of managing, hiring, firing and the other was designing the software and testing so I

moved out of that model... there was a start up phase where I couldn‘t have done it

without the students, then there was a subsequent phase where we had such a

sophisticated system and a thousand journals were depending on us and I can‘t say well,

we only have students for 10 hours a week, call back in three days.

The risk associated with open source systems, because they are free, is that users are often left to fend for themselves if something goes wrong. Within the popular mythology of open source, such as in Raymond‘s characterization of the ―bazaar‖ (2005), open source software users have some degree of technical knowledge and can fix problems themselves, or wait for an explanation on a user forum; thus they are typified as user-developers. If this doesn‘t happen, they might abandon the software project and either build their own application or look for one that works better for them. However the purpose behind the PKP/OJS was not based on the notion that

Willinsky needed the software as solution for his own work, and so built it and then released it open source. Rather, the OJS, for Willinsky, was an academic experiment and exercise, the success of which depended on a broad user base. Furthermore, his users were for the most part not user-developers, but were scholars with very little expertise and few technical resources. As a

133 consequence, Willinsky‘s sense of duty to provide OJS users with an adequate amount of technical services grew. As he explains, ―the responsibilities increased greatly. Even though it‘s open source and its community based, you are responsible and people have trusted you and you need to be there‖. As he explains it, this contributed to his decision to partner with the SFU, where, as he states: ―they were in the business of working with professionals, I then thought that

I could get out of that business [of managing students]‖. Up until the point that the PKP/OJS moved to the SFU in 2005, the project was in essence a part of Willinsky‘s research activities within UBC‘s department of education. Willinsky, in conjunction with a growing network of researchers around the country, was conducting several research projects around access, literacy and reading on the web via this project.

5.2.4 The PKP moves to SFU

In 2005, the SFU library took over the PKP and the development of the OJS. This move, perhaps a form of ‗forking‘, occurred as a part of a partnership with the university‘s Canadian Center in for Studies in Publishing (CCSP), which also undertook some of the software development, particularly a special customization that enabled journals produced by the OJS to add a subscription page and close off access to the content. Even though the intention behind the software was to provide users with a way to publish open access journals, Willinsky felt that the provision of a subscription page for journals would capture more users, and those users could then release their information in what is called a ―delayed open access model‖ in which they could release their articles for free at a later date. Furthermore, being an academic based software project, Willinsky also felt that the collaborating with the CCSP was part of the spirit of scholarly collaboration. The CCSP was an early adopter of the OJS software, and as the early versions of the software were developed and released members of the institute had gotten

134 involved in customizing, re-developing and fixing bugs in the software. As is written by a member of the CCSP about their involvement in the PKP project on the PKP community contributions web site:

At first we made those enhancements on our own, but based on my own research into the

benefits of open source community software development, I encouraged our developers

to get in touch with the team at OJS and we quickly found that we had much in common.

Not only that, but some of our priorities were not priorities for the OJS at the time

(subscriptions, for example). So, we developed code that provided enhancements that we

needed, but we did so in a way that would allow them to be included in the *main* code

for the project. Over the years we have submitted many small (bug fix) and large (the

subscriptions module) pieces to the code, all the while keeping our overall software and

development costs WAY below what they were before we went with the OJS software. In

fact, we have a system with three times the functionality and our software cost is less

than one third what it used to be. And with our code submissions, OJS still feels like

"our" system‖. (pkp.sfu.ca/community_contributions)

It is notable that the CCSP‘s relationship to the PKP was based on the fact that the software was open source, and as they contributed to its development, their relationship changed from contributor to partner. It is also interesting that, furthermore, their work on the system imparted the CCSP with a sense of ownership towards the system. By 2005, the PKP/OJS was considered a three way partnership between the UBC‘s faculty of education, SFU‘s CCSP, and the SFU library. The OJS represented an opportunity for collaboration between the three organizations showing how open source software can be at the root of strategic collaborative efforts that evolve spontaneously, particularly as contemporary academic institutions tend to be internally silo-ized.

135

According to the above narrative, all it took was ―getting in touch‖ to create the beginnings of the OJS network. This is an interesting discursive construction in the way that it suggests a casual opportunity. The SFU library, seeing the opportunity as well, helped with the management and hiring of developers, and participated in the development work on the software, while

Willinsky remained the lead investigator who managed the research elements and secured much of the funding for the project through his own endowed professorship, grants and awards.

While it is true that the CCSP‘s partnership in the PKP occurred because it was involved as users and developers with the OJS, the relationship between the PKP/OJS and the SFU library took place as a result of a number of elements that seemed to coalesce. One important factor is that some of the members of the OJS team on the SFU side had formerly worked at UBC, and knew

Willinsky from their time there. In talking about how the entire PKP project has a very ‗local‘ flavour to it, despite it being a globally distributed open source software project, CMP7 explains:

―I actually had been at UBC before I came here so I knew John [Willinsky] from UBC and was aware that he was interested, particularly in trying to enter into more partnerships with libraries...‖. This is something that Willinsky himself refers to in the story of behind SFU‘s involvement. As he states: ―it was entirely a matter of SFU being the right place with someone who already knew my background...‖. CMP2, an important administrator and decision maker at the SFU Library who was pivotal in deciding to take on the project also knew Willinsky prior to working at the SFU because she had been a librarian at the UBC. This speaks to an important condition in the development of this particular open source software project which is that many of the core members of the project knew each other in some way or another prior to working on the project. The SFU library was willing to enter into a partnership with the PKP/OJS because of this prior relationship, and these connections were part of the driving force behind the project‘s

136 evolution. While housing the PKP/OJS for the SFU library was not a large investment per se, it is conceivable that if prior relationships had not existed, the library would have been a less willing partner. Thus there is a difference between the early shape of the PKP/OJS where there are prior relationships that provide the social structure to the project, and the ―great babbling bazaar‖, shapeless, of Raymond‘s open source software presented in chapter one. This exemplifies the re-constitution of existing social relations.

Another condition that played a large part in the SFU Library‘s adoption of the PKP/OJS was the library‘s prior experience with open source software development. As Willinsky states: ―the key development factor was CMP7 moved to SFU, and SFU was already developing open source software‖. The SFU library was involved in an application called reSearcher which is a set of tools that facilitates locating and managing electronic information resources (researcher.sfu.ca/).

Initially the library was using a commercial product but the SFU library began developing a web based version of the application using in-house developers. As CMP2 explains:

That was around 1996, and it was around that time we decided that we weren‘t going to

be able to make a fortune selling [what they were developing] to other libraries. We were

doing this on behalf of a number of different libraries; it wasn‘t just a development for

ourselves, so we decided to go to an open source model. We‘ve continued the

development. There are several pieces to that software similarly to the PKP software.

This experience with open source software is important for two reasons. The first is that because reSearcher was developed in-house, the library knew the processes needed for the management of a software project, including the human elements. The second important issue is that SFU possessed experience with the intellectual property issues associated with going open source

137 since at the time open source was not as much a part of the mainstream as it is currently. The notion of giving something away for free, though not the initial ethic behind the researcher software which SFU would have commercialized had it been viable, was not necessarily as contentious as it might be in other university environments where academic capitalism is a dominant modality. As CMP8 explains:

SFU has a good IP [intellectual property] policy. In general if I, as the author of open

source software want to commercialize…anything; any information technology; biotech,

software, whatever, want to commercialize it I have to state my intent to the university,

they will support me in that commercialization for a cut of the profits but if I don‘t intend

to commercialize it and release it open source for example they are not interested.

The issue of intellectual property was slightly problematic for Willinsky when the OJS was housed primarily at the UBC. It was not that the university was unsupportive of open source software, but their existing policies at the time, were not capable of dealing with it appropriately.

As Willinsky explains:

I released OJS as open source software and I did not clear it with my university, my

employer, even though the university has an intellectual property policy that makes it

very clear that if the university was involved in the development of the intellectual

property, it has a right to participate in the commercialization of that property and in

return it will help the professor, the faculty member obtain a patent or appropriate

protection, it will form a liaison with industry to help get it funded so that‘s the basis and

thrust of the policy. What wasn‘t clear in the policy was what if you didn‘t want to

138

commercialize your intellectual property; what if there was some other route you wanted

to go?

Therefore, as Willinsky describes, it was not that the university wanted him to release the software under a commercial or closed license, but rather the administrators were weary of the exclusion of the university from commercialization that might take place. UBC university administrators had no experience with open licenses because they did not fall cleanly into any technology transfer and commercialization categories. Furthermore, forming a partnership with

SFU, a university in the same geographic region as UBC seemed problematic. Willinsky himself admits some culpability in this episode. As he explains:

I didn‘t pay attention to the policy and didn‘t address that question. I had had an

experience a few years prior to that in which my intellectual property was reviewed by

the industry liaison office at UBC and it was felt not to have any intellectual property

value for the university and I had sort of taken that as a carte blanche which was a

mistake. The other element that was involved in this case is that I was partnering with

SFU so it struck my senior administrator, the Dean, that I had given our intellectual

property to SFU and was enabling them to profit from it when he couldn‘t.

SFU‘s experience with the open source software via reSearcher, facilitated the acceptance of the

OJS. It was relatively easy for the project to be added to the library‘s information technology activities, as administrators with the SFU had dealt with open source licenses. As the PKP project progressed, Willinsky developed many strategic partnerships. As he explains: ―I have associations with many organizations; we sign these ‗Memorandums of Understanding‘ with

139

SFU it just clicked, clicked, clicked. They had great people- all of a sudden the progress began to develop...‖.

The SFU Library‘s willingness to partner on the PKP/OJS can be contrasted, according to some participants, against the UBC library‘s attitude towards the software, where in 2007 it was still only a pilot project. As one UBC librarian explains: ―I think the feeling among some people is that we kind of lost OJS, we lost sort of that project because we weren‘t really ready enough to be at the plate, we weren‘t quite there. UBC is a big, big institution; it‘s really slow moving compared to SFU‖. One core member, part of the SFU library, expressed a certain degree of shock over the UBC library not putting more into the PKP/OJS. As he states:

I would be fascinated to know what some of the conversations have been at UBC and

from my perspective, really interested to know what some of those conversations have

been in the library…around PKP- because you‘ve got UBC faculty of education with

John Willinsky making a huge in-put, and he goes to the UBC library and says I need a

partner… and they turn him down? They turn him down? And so he turns to SFU, and we

are on it, and now we are doing all these great things. We are part of all this, why on

earth it isn‘t the UBC library… and I would think that there must be librarians at UBC

who are unhappy with the way that has transpired.

UBC‘s disinterest in building up the OJS project, as compared to SFU‘s willingness, was to those involved in the project, indicative of differing management styles and overall social cultures. As one UBC librarian explained, ―the way things operate at the UBC library are different than at the SFU library‖. According to participants, the handling of the OJS project by

UBC was indicative of a particular organizational culture in which there is a slow and overly

140 bureaucratic planning process. In the latter, at the SFU, according to members of the software project, the culture allows for initiatives to move along more quickly, which accordingly was more in keeping with the spirit of technology development. At the time that I conducted my interviews, the UBC library was in the midst of implementing a digital institutional repository, and the librarian was hopeful that UBC‘s OJS activities would be coordinated with this effort. As she explained, the decision to implement the repository was an arduous one but that in comparison, the ―SFU has had their [institutional repository] for a few years now and I don‘t get the sense that it had to be this multi-year planning process. It was kind of like well here‘s the software; let‘s just see what we can do‖ (CU13). She is also careful to explain that UBC‘s indecisiveness around support for the project was coming more from ―the top‖, and that the project needed to be sold to the ―administrative level‖.

An additional slowdown in UBC‘s decision making process, at that point, was that with SFU now housing and running the project, top administrators felt that it might not be of value on a resource level to duplicate the service with the two universities in such close proximity, though at the point of our conversation no decisions had been made. At the time of the interview, OJS use at the UBC library totalled seven journals using the software. The people involved in these journals knew about the program based on ―word of mouth advertising‖. As the UBC librarian explained further: ―I don‘t think that the university has a sense of…you know the big university…I don‘t know that anyone outside of the library other then the journal managers and

John and some of the people connected with the project even know that we‘re doing it‖ (CU13).

While this librarian was clear in stating that support for the OJS at the UBC was weak, Willinsky himself was reticent to state outright that the UBC has been unsupportive of his activities. As he explains:

141

UBC is supporting the project ... the very first thing I did was meet with the librarian at

UBC in the early days of PKP, and the university librarian immediately provided a server

and space, an entire server, dedicated server in the library with back up and maintenance

and all of those things so I had their support completely. That‘s all I ever needed at that

point.

While Willinsky might have felt supported enough by the UBC, other respondents saw the UBC library‘s attitude towards the PKP as part of a more general behavioural trend. In making the point that SFU is a more collaborative institution than the UBC, CMP4 explains:

I know your topic is PKP and I will try not to divert away from that but reSearcher (the

software developed in-house) is really a good example of where UBC has had absolutely

no interest in participating in that software, and went for commercial alternative, whereas

the other BC academic libraries have flocked to OSS and have even not just decided not

to go with commercial vendors, but in some cases when we developed a new feature that

they had a commercial vendor doing, dropped the contract with the commercial vendor to

go OSS. So we have had a lot of success in our collaboration with the mid to small, and

we don‘t even think of the UBCs and the Albertas [referring to the University of Alberta]

of the marketplace for OSS. We‘d love to have them collaborate with us but we know

that they are not interested in doing that.

It is important to highlight how the attitudes towards these technology projects positions universities in particular ways because it attests to the growing importance of digitally mediated web-based projects within the arena of higher education. UBC‘s ambivalent reaction to the OJS and towards the home-grown reSearcher signified that the institution was more traditional which

142 in turn meant it was willing to compete and interact only with institutions that were in its own league. By contrast, the respondents felt that SFUs involvement in open source software development and in the PKP/OJS meant that it was a more progressive institution. Their involvement signified something larger for the university beyond simply the project‘s function as a piece of software that produces journals. As CMP7, an SFU library administrator explains:

Other libraries have made their mark in different ways also, and what SFU I think has

been doing in the last ten years certainly is we‘ve managed to establish a very strong

reputation as being very innovative and usually on the technology side so there‘s a

willingness to jump into project like we did 2½ years ago with the PKP. Yeah, I think it

fits well in SFU‘s kind of sense of what it‘s all about. First of all its size, as an academic

site in the Pacific Northwest. You don‘t compete with the Harvard‘s and the Yale‘s or

even the Universities of Toronto and Universities of British Columbia when you‘re only

barely 40 years old and still mid-sized. SFU has managed I think to establish a profile or

reputation by communications and technology, and I think by extension we‘ve modeled

some of our activities in the library in the same [way]…okay, we‘ve got a university that

I think prides itself on wanting to be innovative or maybe even kind of pushing the

envelope a little bit at times. How do we emulate that behaviour in the library? Well,

again in terms of just our resources and kind of the background [we have] a lot of people

who are quite comfortable with pushing into the technology areas and in particular open

source program and development programs.

According to CMP7, the SFU library‘s open source software development projects distinguish it from other academic libraries and institutions, and play a part in the institution‘s identity and positioning. When CMP7 described his daily job, he admitted that it was ―just all the kind of

143 daily library related stuff that I‘m responsible for‖ but that he was also involved in some

―external projects‖ and that ―actually SFU Library seems to have a much higher degree of involvement in initiatives rather than just our daily work‖. The projects become a way for the institution to develop inroads and connections, and to compete with other institutions. CMP7 is not alone in his interpretation of the value of these projects. One core member who began working on the OJS while working for a journal out of the University of Toronto, recounted a conversation he had with a University of Toronto librarian about SFU‘s involvement in these projects. As he describes: ―she said, you know you‘re a great guy and I‘d love to have you in here working for us, but she said, go out West and work for SFU because they are more progressive, and you‘ll be able to get the stuff you want done there, and here you‘ll be fighting red tape. I think that attitude really happens in institutions‖ (CMP5). Through its open source software development activities, SFU established itself as a more progressive institution. This view was held not only by project members and core users, but also by users of the software scattered throughout the world.

This shows how involvement in a DMORP contributes to the formulation (and re-formulation) of institutional identities. This notion recalls the theory of the ―condition of publicity‖ which invokes the idea that university identities and reputations in the age of ―performativity‖ - in constant media exposure- are always being affected.

5.2.5 Institutional differentiation: UBC versus SFU

Since according to my research participants, open source software projects seem to play a role in the construction of a university‘s identity, it is worthwhile to look at SFU and UBC‘s existing

144 positions and reputations within arena of Canadian higher education. The landscape of British

Columbia higher education consists of eleven publicly funded universities, eleven colleges and three institutes, as well as a variety of private degree granting post-secondary institutions. The system is marked by its high degree of transfer functions between institutions, as well as, over the past few decades, by a sense of change, as the government has recently granted university status to three former colleges. As of late, increasing access post-secondary education has been a main priority for BC‘s system of higher education (Plant, 2007).

In their article connecting changes to post-secondary education in Canada with neo-liberal imperatives, Fisher et. al. describe how B.C. post-secondary education has, in many ways, moved towards vocationalism, translating the need to improve access into the need for post- secondary education to meet the demands of the labour market (Fisher, Rubenson, Jones, &

Shanahan, 2009). Although changes to post-secondary education have lead to ―academic drift‖ within the sector, overall, the impact of creating ―quasi-markets‖ has lead to increased higher education participation rates. Though as Metcalfe explains, such changes have fallen short of their goal to increase access since: ―the North, the interior, and much of Vancouver Island continue to be literally marginalized in a cartographic sense by the geographic distribution of higher education institutions. In short, the new system does not recognize a substantial portion of province and its population‖ (2009). Recent changes within the arena of higher education in

British Columbia have impacted not only the differentiation of institutions within the system, but also their institutional identities. As new universities are born- or made, UBC‘s position as the oldest and most traditional institution is further solidified.

The University of British Columbia was established in 1908, and officially began classes in 1915

(Archives; Logan, 1958) and today it is considered one of the ―big five‖ universities in Canada.

145

As the oldest university in British Columbia, the result of the passing of the University Act in BC in 1908, UBC is one of the largest universities in all of Canada. As a research intensive university, UBC receives a significant amount of federal research funding for the production of scientific and academic knowledge. The university also consistently ranks as first, second or third within Canadian university rankings, and within the top thirty within world rankings such as the Times Higher Education Supplement. It‘s role as a research university within the system of BC higher education cannot be overstated, particularly as so many of the universities in

British Columbia are relatively ‗young‘, having attained their university status‘ only in recent decades. As part of the plan to increase accessibility to quality higher education in British

Columbia, the UBC opened a satellite campus in city of Kelowna, within the area known as the

Okanagan. In 2004, the Okanagan University College, which provided transfer courses for students to attend UBC, and granted degrees in the name of UBC, was separated into two entities: the UBC Okanagan and the Okanagan College (website). The UBC is a traditional

Canadian research university from the point of view of its history and establishment, its funding and size, and in comparison to other Canadian research universities. On some levels, however, it has a reputation that is more progressive than its counterparts. As an example, the UBC houses perhaps the only First Nations Longhouse, established in 1987, dedicated to studying Aboriginal culture, supporting Aboriginal, Inuit and Metis students and youths, and funding research in these areas. The UBC was also the first Canadian university to offer a Woman‘s studies degree, in 1971. On the other hand, the university has also demonstrated a clear willingness to partner with private corporations, to develop their real estate, raise funding for capital projects and to sponsor programs, and as such demonstrates, to some degree, capitalistic tendencies. Overall, the

UBC, while supportive of local communities and activities and progressive on the curricular

146 level, can be seen as probably the most traditional of all of the post-secondary institutions in

British Columbia.

In 1963, John Macdonald, President of the UBC, published a landmark report about the future of higher education in British Columbia in which he recommended the creation of a number of new community colleges and universities (Macdonald, 1962). Simon Fraser University, located in

Burnaby, British Columbia was a direct result of that report. SFU Burnaby‘s doors opened in

1965. Today, the university has established two additional locations, one in Surrey, a large suburban city near Vancouver, and the other in downtown Vancouver. SFU Vancouver, established in a ―storefront on Howe street in 1980‖ takes great pride integrating with local downtown communities, and as such is dedicated not only to preserving public spaces in downtown Vancouver, but subsidizing public and private housing, and daycare facilities. As the younger of the two universities within the lower mainland of British Columbia, SFU differentiated itself from UBC by offering applied programs and the university excelled particularly in the areas of communications, the Canadian Center for Studies in Publishing, and applied contemporary arts. Unlike UBC, SFU does not have a medical or law school. SFU offers both undergraduate and graduate degrees, and has become, over the past decade, a leading university in terms of rankings. Ultimately, because of its specialization in communications, contemporary arts, and applied sciences, and because of its age, SFU as compared to UBC is perceived as the more progressive of the two institutions. What is interesting in this consideration of the university context in the development of the PKP/OJS project is how the direction of the project ties into the existing institutional identities of universities involved in the narrative. DMORPs, even though they remain largely off the radar of the central university administration, do not inhabit an otherworldly expanse of digital bits and bytes, but play a role in

147 the conversation about institutional identities. In this case, the PKP/OJS project built on existing and pre-conceived identities.

The OJS also impacted the global reputation of SFU. Many of the core developers commented on how reSearcher and OJS contribute to SFU‘s reputation beyond the local Canadian academic community. Therefore, according to the core OJS members, open source projects raised the profile of the university globally. As CMP8 explains:

We see things popping up when people do those survey articles talking about software

that‘s out there. I think one of the ones that is particularly interesting is the Library

Technology Reports. There was a whole article that was on link resolvers, which are a

particular type of software used by libraries and are locally developed solutions. They

had four or five examples and… the four sites they listed were places like University of

North Carolina, Ohio link which is a huge consortium, two other places and Simon Fraser

University Library. We‘re keeping company with what you‘d typically see of much

larger institutions that have been around for a few hundred years.

The lead developer felt that the project helped SFU‘s reputation on the global level. As he states:

Well, I hope it‘s not ego speaking but I think it‘s a major feather in the cap. It‘s been

fantastic to see people from the all over the world, coming to our web site to ask

questions, to interact. We have got thanks and congratulations, those are always great.

(CMP1)

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It is also interesting to see how important the act of visiting web-site is, according to CMP1, to the reputation of the university. Another participant commented on how the OJS contributed to more attention for the SFU web site. As CMP2 states:

I think that that‘s definitely something…we track, I do anyway, the traffic…you can

track the traffic and the PKP on SFU‘s website, the libraries…well the SFU website itself

is about a third and then the library is 12% or something, the PKP is about 7th on that list.

So in terms of traffic, there‘s quite a bit.

This was important she mentioned because ―it helps generally in terms of funding agencies and that kind of thing... knowing that SFU‘s name gets around.‖ The value of the project to the SFU was not only that participation made the institution seem more progressive and innovative, and that it strengthened its reputation, but that it also allowed the SFU to contribute to the world of scholarship- not just to the development of information technology. As CMP2 states:

The project as a whole aims to enhance and increase the quality and the amount of

scholarly publications and knowledge that is out there. So in that sense every institution

that does research is affected by having other people outside of the university community

being able to see more research of better quality. If you raised the quality of the research

one notch as a whole with a project like this or…at least that‘s the overall aim, then

everyone that does research benefits.

It was evident from the responses of the participants that open source software projects, and the

OJS had a large impact on the SFU, as opposed to being, simply technology projects that perform a certain function. Indeed, according to the core OJS developers the adoption of the project affected SFU‘s reputation both at home and globally, and opened up new public faces for

149 the institution. Their comments can be contrasted against the way they spoke about both the

UBC and the University of Toronto, which according to them were less willing to participate and get involved because they were larger and more traditional. The notion here is that information technology projects are not simply sideline facilitators, but are becoming more central devices within the setting of current higher education. To draw from Clarke‘s vocabulary, the OJS exemplifies how open source software projects are both ―agents‖ and ―arenas‖.

At the same time, what is interesting about these statements and perspectives is that the PKP/OJS developed off of the overall radar of the general university. In fact, those employed full time by the SFU Library considered the OJS to be only a small part of their designated work, while the funding for the project came from journals hosted by the university, or awards and grants that

Willinsky secured. In response to whether the PKP/OJS garnered any attention from top level

SFU administrators, such as the president of the university, one core member of the project admitted:

I think it is safe to say that PKP has gotten attention or notice from SFU Senior

Administrators, primarily because we take pains to point out to them the work we are

doing and all of the international attention and prestige it brings to SFU. What is not so

clear is whether they are hearing about PKP independently of our shameless promotion.

I'll let you know if I find out more! (CMP4)

When CMP4 was asked directly about whether this ‗attention‘ bred tangible benefits he replied:

―exactly the question! I've asked my bosses to let me know of any effects‖ (CMP4). Indeed, throughout my interviews with the core members of the project, very little mention was made of reaction towards the project by senior level administrators, or to the university in general, expect

150 for more abstract and generalized references to the benefits of the OJS to SFU. And CMP4‘s comment is ambiguous enough to mean that while administrators might have heard about the

PKP, they have not made very much effort in recognizing its significance. The project has gotten some attention from the public affairs office at SFU in the form of two media and press releases announcing the partnership between SFU and UBC. However these releases, available on the

SFU web are dated 2005, and precede two of the major milestones in the project‘s history: the

PKP 2007 conference, and the involvement of the OJS in the Synergies project.

SFU‘s 2006-2007 presidential report (www.sfu.ca/report2006/) describes important scholarship, research and teaching developments happening at the university, as well as the university‘s positioning in relation to funding and research awards in comparison to other Canadian universities. It also contributes to the public image and branding of the university. The front page message of the report states the following:

At Simon Fraser University, we think good ideas should get out and travel. Sure, our

researchers need their labs, and our students their classrooms. But we like to kick our best

thinking out of the nest so it can fly around the block or across the planet, broadening

minds and benefiting lives.

The purpose and function of the PKP/OJS serves this precise goal by providing ways for research to reside online in open formats so that it can be accessed by increasingly broad audiences, and furthermore by providing much needed attention and advocacy around this issue.

The OJS, however, was not mentioned in the President‘s report.

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5.2.6 The Synergies Project

The Synergies: Canadian Information Network for Research in the Social Sciences and

Humanities Project, funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (www.innovation.ca) is a national consortium composed of twenty one Canadian universities whose aim is to move

Canadian social science and humanities research from print into web based environments. This is a national project that is broken down into regional ‗nodes‘ with each node servicing the sub- nodes and networks below it. The various nodes are responsible for developing a type of publication and dissemination technology, and establishing its use within their network of colleges, universities and research institutes. Synergies is a decentralized project whose aim is to provide an array of different information technology solutions to the various fields and disciplines that it wishes to serve. An abstract from a presentation of the Synergies project presented at the PKP/OJS conference explains that:

Using the Internet, Synergies will also provide the global research community with a

unique Web interface to Canadian research, thereby increasing its visibility and impact

throughout the world. The technologies used in Synergies will permit Canadian articles to

be indexed more systematically in international indexing databases and the search results

for Canadian documents in international subject indexes will be linked to the full text in

Synergies. Other dissemination strategies will be put in place to ensure that Canadian

content is present in dissemination platforms such as Project Muse, CNRS and Persée as

well as local dissemination infrastructures created by libraries such as the Ontario

Scholar‘s Portal. (http://ocs.sfu.ca/pkp2007/viewabstract.php?id=57)

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The five universities chosen as the main nodes, or the ―first level‖ of the network, and the recipients of the majority of the funding in the Synergies network include the University of New

Brunswick, the Universite de Montreal, the University of Toronto, the University of Calgary, and

SFU. The OJS was chosen as one of the main technology platforms to be developed, promoted and implemented across the country. The funding for this part of the Synergies project was awarded to the SFU library.

OJS‘ role within the Synergies project was very important to the OJS development team. All of the core members of the project referred to the Synergies grant many times throughout our conversations, and many of the Canadian users who were interviewed in this project also knew about it, and mentioned it in their questionnaire responses. According to the OJS developers, the

Synergies represented a ―stable future for the project‖ and a way to address ―the wishlist that‘s been growing for the last two years‖ as well as opportunities to form ―some great partnerships‖

(CMP1). It was also significant on the reputational level. As CMP5 states:―being involved in things like the Synergies project which is a major CFI funded thing with a total of $11 million in project funding. SFU libraries is one of the five kind…we‘re the BC lead for that and one of the five major leads across Canada. It‘s interesting that here‘s the library all of a sudden also being involved in research initiatives or at least research funding initiatives that I think bring credibility and add to the overall reputation of the university‖. According to respondents, the funding from

Synergies would be spent on converting journals from either print or other digital environments into the OJS environment, hiring more developers to accomplish some software redesign and documentation, and also providing free hosting for some Canadian based journals.

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5.2.7 OJS as a „global‟-Canadian project

The global reach of OJS has become an important element and source of pride for the OJS team.

The PKP web site features an interactive map that details the geographic span of the project: pkp.sfu.ca/ojs-geog. Therefore, while the PKP/OJS team is proud of the fact that they now have over 5000 journals on the system, the team feels a special sense of satisfaction that their users are globally distributed—as if the project was more valuable for being used globally. However, at the same time, most of the core members, when asked whether OJS was a global project, agreed that it was most certainly a Canadian project with a global reach. As CMP5 states: ―OJS is kind of like that traveler with a Canadian flag in his back pack; you know, he says ‗I‘m from Canada,

I‘m here to help and be part of the rest of the world‘, and that‘s how I see OJS and I think, it may not always be like that, it may be my own nostalgia, but it‘ll always sort of have that Canadian flag on its backpack, and you can add more flags‖. According to CMP6 who travelled around

Latin America providing training and seminars to publishers, the software is:

Slowly becoming less North American centric but it‘s, very, let‘s say, Canadian centric in

the sense of all the ideas of how everything works, the whole editorial process, it‘s all the

way things work here... [But] with the community contributing and making suggestions,

it‘s slowly becoming something that‘s more applicable worldwide, so in that sense, it is I

think a Canadian project, but because of it‘s span and reach, especially now with having

specific workshops in different parts of the world, promoting the use in different parts of

the world and with partnerships with the people in Brazil, the project in that sense is not

Canadian…it‘s a global project with a global reach.

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The project‘s ‗Canadian-ness‘ was also connected to its funding sources, and Synergies being a national project that emphasized bringing Canadian social sciences and humanities to the web further increased this element. Willinsky believed that the OJS was a specifically Canadian project largely to its funding, however his statements also point to the notion that this might change in the future, or perhaps even that he was not really sure precisely what about the project was Canadian. As he explains:

The Social Science and Humanities Council funding has been so instrumental.

Everything else…the Mellon, the McArthur, Max Bell out of…you were with me on the

Max Bell in Calgary? No maybe not. Max Bell Foundation, the OSI- so New York, ISRC

in Ottawa has been huge so I would say 50% of our funding is Canadian, more then 50%

is Canadian, but this will change now with…I mean part of my interest in going to

Stanford was the opportunity of starting to get more American money and the Mellon

Foundation has told me frankly that I‘ll do much better as a Stanford professor.

While the PKP/OJS core development team were resolute in their attitudes towards the national identity of the project, and for this reason felt a sense of ownership over the project, they seemed to also feel that a shifting of identity was on the horizon as the project developed further.

5.2.8 Open source software as an anchor in a time of „symbolic uncertainty‟

There are several issues that stand out in the preceding description of the PKP/OJS project and its move to the SFU library. These issues are explained well by McLennan et al‘s statement that:

―that there is no single institutional story to be told‖ when it comes to the contemporary university‖. As they continue: ―the drive for central direction is countered by a high degree of

155 decentralization, and that continual modernisation encounters traditionalist resistance‖ (p.258).

The push-pull between the centralized and the de-centralized, the traditional and the modern, which I see as some of the many spaces of contradiction born of online activities, or rather a re- birth of some of these spaces, occurs in several ways in the preceding narrative of the development of the OJS in relation to the higher education context: Willinsky attributed the success of the OJS to the fact that students were his developers, but later moved to the project to the SFU because they offered a more ‗professional‘ environment; respondents named the OJS project as evidence of SFU being a progressive and innovative university, and describe how it is helping the university make its mark in the world, while at the same time they comment upon how the OJS developed off of the radar of top level administrators and despite the fact that the software‘s purpose falls in line with the recent re-branding of the university.

The last space of contradiction relates to the location of the project: the OJS is a Canadian project despite the growing global community of code contributions, and despite the fact that the main project leader was leaving to teach at an American university. These points of contradiction can be evidence of the insular nature of certain communities, specifically information technology rooted communities and social worlds, within current university environments. They could, as well, be evidence of what theorists, such as McLennan are calling ―symbolic uncertainty‖

(p.242), Barnett‘s ―supercomplexity‖(2000), or Bloland‘s ―post-modernity‖(1995) in higher education.

The development of the OJS within the SFU library demonstrates the production of a specific institutional identity for the universities involved. SFU, because of its involvement with open source projects, is named by those involved as ‗progressive‘ and ‗professionalized‘, enthusiastic, and a competitor amongst other more well known and reputable universities, even though a large

156 reason why the project was adopted within the university had to do with existing social relationships between project members. The UBC on the other hand, because of its unwillingness to engage fully with these projects was perceived as slow and bureaucratic. Thus we see how open source software projects are beginning to play a role in determining and securing the institutional identities of universities, as universities become more involved in digital academic space. We also see how these projects are not examples of new spaces, but are rather examples of how social relations within the university are replicated and reconstituted. Thus, as the theorists mentioned above write about uncertainty and instability, we can also see how some aspects of the contemporary university persist amidst all of the changes.

In this chapter I present some of the context, history and details of the OJS, as a set-up for the proceeding chapters. I also hoped to connect the PKP specifically to the SF to show the impact of the project on the institution. In the next chapter I discuss the open source software development process, how it functioned within this project, and the motivations and perspectives of the core members of the project not only in relation to open source software, but also in relation to the role and function of the contemporary university.

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Figure 7. Screenshot of the OJS journal African Journal of Infectious Diseases.

The African Journal of Infectious Diseases (AJID) is a new journal that publishes papers which make an original contribution to the understanding of infectious diseases. Any paper relating to impact, care, prevention and social planning will be considered for publication. Reports of research related to any aspect of the fields of microbiology, parasitology, infection, and host response, whether laboratory, clinical, or epidemiologic, will be considered for publication. Major Articles, Short Communications, Correspondence, Editorials, and Review articles are considered for publication. The Journal welcomes the submission of manuscripts that meet the general criteria of significance and scientific excellence.

From ―About the Journal‖, African Journal of Infectious Diseases, journals.sfu.ca/africanem.

Chapter 6: “Rock Stars by Night”: Portrait of OJS Developers

In the previous chapter I provided an oral history of the development of the OJS, and examine its role in relation to the institutional identity of SFU, arguing that despite growing off the radar of the central university, OJS has and SFU‘s other open source software projects have contributed to its identity. In this chapter I describe the core OJS software development and project team, and extrapolate the meaning of this group in relation to contemporary universities. My aim is in part, to use the core developer‘s responses to understand more about open source software on the procedural level (that is, more about the process of designing and developing software), but more importantly, to shed light on the characteristics of a new group of people inhabiting the university through their involvement in digital academic space generally, and DMORPs more specifically.

The people involved in the PKP/OJS were neither faculty nor students; they were also quite different from the ―managed professionals‖ and ―administrators‖ characteristic of

―entrepreneurial universities‖ referred to by the more critical higher education theorists

(Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). The developers involved in the OJS occupied what can be seen as a ‗space in between‘ the commonly articulated roles in a university setting, and play a part in the organizational form becoming more common in contemporary universities that I am trying to sketch out over the course of this research study. Are the developers a new form of flexible labour, symptomatic of the growing ―network culture‖ (Tiziana Terranova, 2004) that is growing in the ―post-modern university‖? Or are they a reconstituted set of professionals derived from an

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159 existing social group already present in the university? As with many academics, the personal identities of the OJS developers were deeply connected to their involvement in the project, and more generally in their software development activities. At the same time, unlike academics, however the core developers also admitted to enjoying the flexibility associated with their contractual employment. Additionally, while the SFU library provided an environment and administration that played a large role in the project‘s success, the core developers felt more connected to the PKP project and the OJS software, rather than to the library or to the university.

This is interesting to note in light of some of the concepts presented within in the literature where theorists ask researchers to look beyond preconceived analytical categories to understand more about changes to contemporary higher education. Here, it is the ‗project‘ that is the central organizational structure with which the core developers identified.

A secondary goal in this research project was to understand more about how the open source software process functioned. Having read so much about the character of open source software development in the literature, I am interested in the way these projects are managed and organized through space and time. As I have shown in my review of the literature about open source software, these projects are seen as revolutionary in the way they are managed for being widely distributed and loosely organized. Eric Raymond opened his iconic essay with the statement that ―Linux (the first well know open source operating system) is subversive‖ and his characterization, while challenged by some, has become pervasive within what has become, in a sense, a mythology surrounding open source software. One important aspect of my research revolved around knowing more about the core developers who worked on the OJS, to understand and document whether indeed academic open source software development can be likened to

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Raymond‘s characterization. My task was to document the ‗social world‘, to use Clarke‘s terminology, of the developers in this open source software project.

One issue at the forefront of this branch of the research related to how ‗distributed‘ the development of the project was through time and space, and to what degree the actual physical context of the university was important to the developers. Understanding more about the

‗location‘ of the developers helps to shed light on what it means for a project to be digital and networked.

6.1 Portrait of the OJS developers

In the OJS project, out of the thirteen people who participated in my interviews I consider five of the respondents as core developers since they perform development and design work on the main body of the software system (as opposed to the marketing and public relations of the project, for which two extra people can be designated, who are employed full time by the SFU library, but work on the project on a part time basis). Two out of the five of these respondents held a background in library and information studies- one was a librarian at the Vancouver Public

Library prior to working for the SFU, and one of the developers was pursuing a master`s degree in library and information studies at the University of Toronto while also working for the PKP.

This respondent already held a degree in computer science from the University of Waterloo. All of the developers were men between the ages of 25 and 35.

The remaining two developers possessed distinct academic backgrounds. The lead developer earned a computer science degree from the SFU and had done some programming work on a contract basis for the university, and the last developer earned a computer science bachelor‘s from the University of Waterloo, and geography master‘s from a university in Peru. Four out of

161 the five developers working on the PKP/OJS, including the lead developer, were employed on a contractual basis on the PKP/OJS and only two of the developers actually lived in Vancouver,

British Columbia. The only developer, a systems librarian, that went to work at the SFU library on a daily basis worked on the PKP on a part time basis. The rest of the time he worked on other software development projects for the SFU library, such as for the library‘s other open source software project. The great majority of the OJS software development did not actually take place at the SFU library.

The OJS software developers expressed their preference for contractual and part time employment, and this preference fell in line with their general outlook on work and life. It also impacted on the way they identified with the university context. For the lead developer, being in control of his schedule and having the ability to travel was paramount because he belonged to a music band that often travelled and toured. He would not let his work with PKP/OJS get in the way of his ―rock star night job‖ (CMP1). The ability to control their own schedules and working conditions was important to the core members. As one developer explains in a conversation about the lead developer:

[T]hat‘s the flexibility that I think largely he is responsible for introducing because he

was a pretty key individual. And he was very clear with SFU that he was more than

happy to continue working there but he wasn‘t coming into the office. He had the

influence to be able to pull that off, and the dedication and the work ethic to demonstrate

that it works. He opened the door for me so that when I said to SFU sorry I am quitting

because my wife got a job in Sudbury, they said, well, wait a minute, this is working with

[CMP1], may be it can work with you, if you are interested. And I said, well, yes! And

it‘s worked really well. And now as we are looking to do more hiring for Synergies, we

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are not even looking at bringing more permanent staff, we are looking at independent

contractors.

Flexibility and independence in their work were important factors for the developers. Another developer describes how the ability to be mobile was important to him and what seemed like a natural part of OJS development work. All he needed was an Internet connection and his laptop.

As he explains:

I mean, [CMP6] and [CMP1] and myself, the three core OJS developers, I mean, our

offices are on our backs. We like to be able to travel around and work from the beach

sometime, and you know, who wouldn‘t want to? What‘s the difference between sitting

on the beach and sipping Pina Coladas and sitting on the beach and developing code

(CMP5)?

The instability that is often associated with contractual work within the university environment was not a concern for the developers, even for the one developer who had a family to support. As he states:

I understand the security benefits. But I quit being full time in 1996 at the Vancouver

Public Library, and haven‘t been full time anywhere since. And it‘s allowed me to go to

Japan, do a semester in Cuba, try a couple of different graduate programs, with home

schooling my kids… I guess, and I always feel funny saying this, but I feel self confident

without the security. I feel like I have a skill set that is demonstrated as valuable. Not just

at SFU but at other places that I have worked. I have been able to give up what I see as

the straight jacket of full time employment, and do things a little bit more my own way.

(CMP4)

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Thus full time employment for the developers signified a daily desk oriented scenario that was unpalatable to the freedom that open source software development seemed to offer them. When they were asked why they could not be full time and flexible as well, they made it clear that this had to do with their image of what it meant to work for a university. As one developer explained:

That‘s university politics and bureaucracy and the fact that if you let one regular

employee work from home then why can‘t you let all other employees work from home?

I mean, frankly, some employees aren‘t suited… within a unionized environment how do

you say ‗you are‘ and ‗you aren‘t‘? I mean, SFU realizes that the only way to make that

work is if you are a full employee you sit at your desk and work. And if you want to work

from home or work from Prague, as (CMP1) did recently, or Sudbury then it‘s by

contract. (CMP4)

This developer‘s statements are interesting particularly in light of the previous chapter in which

SFU was positioned as progressive and spontaneous as a direct result of its involvement in open source software. Here however, SFU is positioned as traditional and bureaucratic. Thus we see that there are so many ways and levels by which universities‘ images and reputations are made and re-made.

In addition, universities have as of late come under fire for refusing to offer their employees stable full time work with benefits which seems more preferable than contract work. Within the arena of university employment, this issue played out in discussions about tenure, which, while once standard for professors, is being offered less and less, and thus campuses are being populated by many more part time and sessional instructors. The tenure debate has very different characteristics than this situation, because of how they are connected to larger academic issues-

164 such as academic freedom. Still, full time employment on campuses even for non-academic workers has been deteriorating as a result of the rise of neo-liberal conditions, and an increase in part-time contractual labour is less than ideal. However the developers that worked on this project all agreed that the flexibility of working in this more ‗project oriented fashion‘ suited their lifestyle as well as the demands of the job. Indeed, this was one of the reasons why they preferred open source programming as opposed to working in a commercial environment, where, they felt they would be ―tied to a desk‖. This is where Terranova‘s work on internet labour, mentioned in my discussion of free and open culture, assumes importance within the context of this study. The flexible labour of the OJS programmers exemplifies new forms of internet labour within the university.

While the OJS developers preferred working for the university, they were not necessarily enthusiastic about working at the university. They preferred to work either from home, or from whatever location in which they happened to be. They viewed the university as a superior alternative to a commercial environment, but they also saw their involvement in the OJS project as a different form of work than a traditional form of university employment. As CMP 4 states:

[w]ithin the university environment I think there can be some very strong Monday to

Friday, 9-5 perspectives, and as laudable as that is as a lifestyle choice, the culture that

we have developed is a little more flexible and I think we get benefits from it. But at the

same time I think there is an expectation that if an emergency happens on Saturday

afternoon, you deal with it. And I think that‘s reasonable.

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That the core PKP/OJS team members worked on a contractual basis did not signify that they were less committed to their work. If anything, as they saw it, the hours that the developers spent on the project, while more irregular, often outnumbered a typical forty hour work week. And because so many code contributions and requests were coming in internationally at different times of the day, developers often responded to questions and requests on user forums at all hours of the day and night. Ultimately, the OJS developers saw themselves as a new and different group of professionals within their vision of a traditional university.

As part of being a group apart, the developers held specific professional loyalties. Throughout our conversations, it became clear that the core developers identified the PKP project as their employer, rather than the SFU library, even though they all understood that the SFU was the institution behind the project. Ultimately none of the developers who were employed contractually displayed resentment towards the university for being part time and contractual; nor did they display a will to become full time or a haphazard commitment to their work. In fact, contrary to this and despite outside interests and hobbies, their work was central within their social world.

6.2 The brotherly bond of open source software development

While the developers were employed by the SFU library, most of their work was accomplished virtually, beyond the walls of the library and the boundaries of the SFU campus. Up until the

PKP conference in the summer of 2007, two of the main developers -CMP5 and CMP6 - had not met the lead developer CMP1. CMP5 resided in Toronto, Ontario full time, while CMP6 split his time between Ottawa, Canada and Buenos Aires, Argentina. CMP1 in turn did most of his work either from his home in North Vancouver, British Columbia, or while touring with his band

166 across Europe. Indeed, CMP4 described how one particular module of the second version of the

OJS had been fully developed while CMP1‘s band was on tour in Prague. Virtual communication via email was the main mode of communication in the development of the OJS.

As CMP5 describes:

[CMP1] and I email each other daily, and [CMP6] and I email each other daily. We are

pretty much in constant contact. But I have only ever actually met him [referring to

CMP1] twice ... and our relationship was completely mediated through email and our

relationship through PKP.

He further describes how CMP6 was excited to meet the OJS team in person at the conference but that he required CMP5 to point people out to him- this despite the fact that they had all communicated via email on the software prior to the conference. As CMP6 explains:

[A]ctually, [CMP5] was asking me ... so like what are the PKP people like? I mean

perfect, example, he has never met any of them, right, and John and was talking about

him, and he has never met any of these people, I had to point [CMP1] out to him, and he

and [CMP1] know each other pretty well.

What is notable about this arrangement was how the developers felt about each other despite not having met in person. They all agreed that it felt like they knew each other quite well, had a common bond, and furthermore, that they all respected one another. As CMP5 states referring to his meeting CMP1 for the first time:

I mean I could show up and immediately know … I had this professional relationship

with him even though I didn‘t even know what he looked like. And there are other

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members of the developer team who have that same sort of relationship. I know their

name, they are very familiar to me, but I have never met them. There‘s an element in a lot

of ways of this distanced relationship, but at the same time there is also that very close

kinship that you can have between developers on the same project.

This aspect of the OJS developers was in line with the popular descriptions of how open source software projects, as they have been described in the literature, tend to. Despite being distributed through space, the developers did describe a connection that they felt with one another that developed across these virtual networks as their work with the OJS advanced. Interestingly, while they were scattered through space, they were not distributed across context since they were all employed by the PKP. None of the core developers were volunteers interested in ―scratching an itch‖ as the scenario often posits in descriptions of open source software programming dictates. Thus the face of open source software in the academy differs than many of the common depictions.

6.3 Origins of developer involvement in the OJS

Another important characteristic that is distinct about the OJS developers relates to how they came to work for the PKP. The core developers of the PKP/OJS became involved in the project in what I describe as an informal, spontaneous manner. All of the core developers‘ involvement in the software development evolved over time, and their roles expanded as the project grew larger and more globalized. In the previous chapter describing the role and origins of the

SFU/PKP/OJS partnership, I noted that many of the people involved in the project had prior professional relationships. As a reminder, two librarians from SFU who were involved in the

PKP/OJS on a higher level worked previously at the UBC knew Willinsky, the original project

168 creator, from their time there, and these prior relationships, to some degree facilitated the partnership. As with the partnership, most of the members of the core OJS team became involved in the project through dealings and communications with the project founder. The lead developer, prior to becoming the lead, had been a student at the SFU, and had done some contractual software development work for one of the university‘s professors. In so doing he met another core developer who had been doing some work re-developing the OJS meta-data tool.

After contacting Willinsky to pick up some work on the project, he eventually took over the software development and ultimately grew into his job as the lead software developer. As this occurred adopted, more and more, the mentality associated with open source software development and open access activism. The SFU librarian-developer CMP8 stumbled upon the software years before it had arrived formally at the SFU library. As he explains:

I actually contacted John because of the meta-data harvester. The harvester is an

application that basically goes and collects the metadata or indexing from a variety of

different sources, and brings it together into a search engine, and the SFU volunteered to

host one of these things on behalf of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries

[CARL], to collect all the indexing from the various institutional repositories that were

being run at these places and I was looking for a piece of software that would allow me to

do this easily. So I wouldn‘t have to reinvent the wheel; so I found the PKP/OJS

metadata harvester and I set it up and played with it and whatnot and I contacted John

Willinsky and the PKP support team of that time. I started asking them some questions

and offering suggestions to improve the software and so forth. So that was a couple of

years before that came here as part of the formal partnership. (CMP8)

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The last two core developers of the project became team members by getting involved in the development of the software as users. Both of them, friends originally from the university of

Waterloo, had customized and redeveloped the software in its early days for a medical journal that they were working for (at different periods of time), and had communicated with the first lead developer who was a student at the UBC (he had left the project prior to the SFU partnership, and was unavailable to interview). Their involvement as PKP team members was also unplanned and informal. As CMP5 describes:

They had the support forum, and that was how I met [the former lead developers], and

John Willinsky, and I was involved then, and I put a lot of effort into being more and

more involved and try to find ways to collaborate with them, and officially started with

them, I guess last summer. I sort of elbowed my way in; I thought this was interesting,

and it was a great project, and I met John and he was just so charismatic that I got more

and more involved until eventually they offered for me to work for them, and I said, I

kinda already am.

CMP6 explains how he not only became part of the team, but also about how his role as a PKP consultant in Latin America expanded and evolved:

I had done a lot of development for OJS within the context of [a medical journal] and it

was all of those developments that I had done, I didn‘t want them to go to waste. I had

contributed to some during my time working for [a medical journal using the software]

and then I proposed to the PKP that if they wanted me to contribute the rest of the things

I developed, I would need some extra time to polish everything up and if they wanted to

hire me on to do those things that I‘d be willing. John Willinsky was very keen so

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immediately I started working on a contract basis with PKP and then just coincidentally

all the things about doing workshops in Latin America came about just because I was

going to be there and they wanted someone to run workshops there.

Willinsky, it is evident, was skilled at leveraging the networking opportunities that presented themselves as more people started to use the software. CMP6‘s work in Latin America is a good example of this: his role travelling around holding workshops there was the result not only of his being partially from Latin America, speaking Spanish, and having an interest in development in that area of the world, but also from the fact that a major code contribution had come from

Brazil, and there had been a surge of interest in the software in that region. Indeed, many aspects of the PKP project can be described as spontaneous rather than strategic, (or may be strategically spontaneous) and that is reflected in how the people working on the project came to their work.

As CMP6 continues:

I sort of fell into the whole scholarly publishing in the world by chance. It‘s not even

something that I ever had a real interest in before. I‘m sort of doing it now because I find

it real interesting, the work I‘m doing but also I don‘t have a vision of working on things

to do with scholarly publishing as a career or anything. It‘s just this is what fell onto my

lap now and I‘m happy to do it.

And yet, despite this being the case, all of the core members of the OJS team, including CMP6, held very strong opinions and ideals, regarding the purpose of the project and their commitment to open source software. Could all of these spontaneous, casual and informal relationships truly be coincidental? Or is there perhaps a sort of super structure in place that supports and encourages the retaining of like minded professionals in this area?

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6.4 OJS developers as independent consultants

The developers held special employment titles. Two of the developers described themselves as

―independent consultants‖ for the SFU library. As CMP4 explains: ―I am an independent consultant. I believe all of the others have the same status. The SFU Library is paying for everyone -- with some of the money coming from the Synergies project funding http://www.synergiescanada.org/) and others directly from the Library. I should also mention that John has grad students that he has work on PKP as research assistants. This he pays for directly via UBC and Stanford money‖. This is corroborated by CMP5 who states that: ―I am an independent consultant. I should also add that occasional expenses that don't fall under the

Synergies funding or can't be covered by the SFU library's budget have occasionally (once, as far as I recall) come from some of John's funds at UBC, but that is extremely rare‖. The title of

‗independent consultant‘ is an interesting discursive construction. On a positional level, it separates the developers away from the common work of the library, into a class of its own. It supports the developers‘ sense of themselves and the work that they are involved in which is different than other SFU library employees. It speaks to their very specific professional identity.

6.5 Geeks and anarchists: Understanding the identity of OJS developers

What is most notable about the conversations with the core developers was the strength of their personal identities, and how these identities connected to their work. Their sense of identity is at the root of the common bond that CMP5 described above, and that this is connected furthermore to how the developers ended up working together on the project. Much of this bond is discursive, by which I mean that the core developers all employed and participated in similar discourses – for example that ―information wants to be free‖- when describing their work and their reasons

172 for participating in the OJS project. These factors play a part in the larger significance of this study because of how they contribute to a picture of a group of individuals who are becoming important constituents in contemporary universities. This group consists of information technology specialists who are often former university students, are employed contractually, who code and develop as part of projects and initiatives, DMORPs, which enable universities to participate in digital academic space. A very important and undeniable characteristic of this group is that they are male, falling in line with prior research on open source software developer.

Thus an important question to ask is, how might this professional group re-constitute existing, and perhaps, problematic social conditions?

Throughout our conversations, the OJS developers articulated a clear sense of their own identities. Many of them adhered to some form of label or typology that was tied to their practice of open source software development. As examples, two of the developers were self-proclaimed

―geeks‖ and admitted that their geek-like proclivities were what lead them to open source software development. One developer named himself ―a slight closet anarchist‖(CMP1) and felt that his work was a ―subversive activity‖. With regards to the former typology, CMP3 explains:

[W]ell, because I am also kinda geeky. I was drawn to librarianship working as a library

assistant, and then working as a systems tech after that, at the Vancouver Public

Library… I just enjoy that software environment and then found that there was something

that was within my interest in software that then meshed with my political interests and

that was open source.

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The other self-proclaimed ‗geek‘ expressed a sincere love for the programming that he does and admitted:

I do the work I do because I have been fortunate enough and if you can have the

opportunity to love your work then you should go for it. If I woke up tomorrow and won

the lottery, I would continue to work on OJS. Like if I were independently wealthy, I

would occupy my time developing open source software. (CMP5)

For the lead developer in the project it was important for the developers to harbor a love for open source software development (as opposed to simply having software development skills) while also having an unrelated hobby- this being part of the right ‗mindset‘ for working on the project.

As he states:

We were doing some interviewing to potentially hire some people as well, and that

played a big role in it- you know, what interest people had in open source. One guy was a

cyclist and you know, it‘s irrelevant, but it is the right mindset - as a group it‘s definitely

important. And everyone ... the work ethic people put into it –it‘s been very visible that

people aren‘t just there for their eight hours and then they go home. People have worked

very hard on the project. (CMP1)

Despite being distributed through space, the developers displayed some collective characteristics which showed that their work, though flexible and contractual, was more than simply employment; their work was part of who they were as people, enmeshed with their personal and professional ambitions, and an expression of themselves. This is what CMP1 meant by having the right ‗mindset‘ for the project, and it was a characteristic that was common to all of the core developers, defining them as group. It is also remarkably similar to the attachment that many

174 academics feel to their own research and work thus begging the question: are the developers a regenerated version of the traditional academic, and if so how what are the power dynamics associated with their positions in the academy particularly as DMORPs, for which they are liaisons, stake out new territory in digital academic space?

In addition to displaying a strong consciousness regarding their personal and professional identities, all of the developers displayed a high level of commitment towards open source software development specifically and the attendant critical attitude towards proprietary or commercially produced software. As CMP1 explains:

I think when you remove the dollar signs as a mandate for why I am working on the

project, why John is not trying to sell it, all those kinds of things, all of a suddenly people

are less ... are more trusting. I am more trusting of users, John is more trusting of me.

And the users have been more trusting of us as a group. (CMP1)

Open source, according to CMP1, was a way to design the best possible software for the needs of his users. As he describes:

With my own work for example there is a complete separation between where the money

comes from and what the money dictates and what the users are saying, and I‘m free in

most cases on doing what is best for the users because we don‘t have that almost conflict

of interest.

He also felt that open source software users had a different relationship with the software than they might have with commercial software. As he states:

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The guys who buy into the OSS process, they know it‘s participatory, they know they are

getting free software, that they can do whatever they want with. Not only do they come

back to us and want to contribute, which is fantastic, I love it, but they are more willing

to come back to us and say what they need. (CMP1)

Interestingly, while CMP1 expressed how important it was to him that the project was open source, how satisfied he is with how the open source aspect is playing out in the design of the software, and how important it is, furthermore for the other developers to buy into the open source development process, he also admits that his being involved in an open source software project was more his good fortune than an actively sought out choice. As he states:

That was pure luck, but it is a big deal for me because I‘ve been ... I‘m fairly passionate

about open source- I have been using open source exclusively for years now, and it is my

first experience working on an open source project on any major scale. I have contributed

to the odd thing before, but on a major scale this is the first. And it has been a really big

part of it although it is pure chance that I‘ve got into it. (CMP1)

The lead developer‘s comments display a strong belief in not only the process of but the product of open source software.

In addition to the lead developer all of the other core OJS members held strong beliefs in the ideological possibilities that open source software development offered. Not only did they agree that open source ultimately lead to higher quality software, but they also held strong opinions about open source software‘s role in their vision of the Internet which they believed ought to be open and public a space as possible. As CMP3 states:

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I think politically and ideologically there is a lot to be said for openness; I think though it

can also result in better software; I mean the best description I have heard about OSS is

‗peer reviewed software‘ and I think that‘s very true and very important. And as a

librarian I find that there‘s a lot of compatibility between my professional ethics of open

access to information and the philosophy of OSS as well.

CMP5 makes a similar point- but in a more aggressive manner. His involvement in the PKP/OJS project was a very direct rejection of the commercial software world which in his view was corrupting the authentic character of the Internet. For him, coding open source was part of a larger fight to keep the Internet open. His adversarial attitude towards commercially developed software is revealed in his comments about the demise of many ‗dotcom‘ companies. As he explains:

It has to do with the fact that we [open source developers] really felt threatened. The

Internet was losing that public exchange aspect to it at that period. But at the same time,

that collapse of it was a real point of rejoicing for us because we saw that it couldn‘t be

sustained. It was like, they came in, they tried to put dollar signs on the Internet and it

didn‘t work. Now whether it was through their own folly or through grassroots or push

back, I really don‘t know the reason for it. But I think the rise, the subsequent rise of

open source software and Open Access, these premises that are completely aligned with

the original appeal of the Internet, the fact that those have become much more prevalent

is kind of a resurgence of hope for us. I mean it is for me, I am looking back, and it is

2007, and the Internet is in better shape than it was 6 –7 years ago, and the popularity of

open source has to do with that. (CMP5)

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As with CMP5, CMP6‘s involvement with the PKP/OJS project was a turn away from the corporate information technology world, which was something in which he did not want to participate. As he states:

[W]hen I was finishing my undergrad in Computer Science, I decided I didn‘t want to

work for a tech company producing software. I think that decision as I was finishing in

my last year I just said no; I had friends going off to Microsoft, friends going off to

Amazon. I was like that‘s not for me. That was from an ideological perspective that I

made that decision. (CMP6)

The core OJS developers saw the Internet as something more important than simply a space in which data and information was exchanged over networks, or where people could purchase commodities online. They adhered to a vision of the Internet as a place of ideas, in which these ideas are circulated and exchanged and through this exchange, grow and morph into other ideas.

Software development for them was a part of this intellectual exchange, a form of knowledge, and ―intellectual pursuit‖ (CMP5), and their participation in the project was an extension of these beliefs. This is the basis for my contention that the developers‘ work in open source software connected to their visions of themselves and to the very core of their identities.

6.6 Open source software development for freedom and equality

The OJS developers‘ motivations for working on the project are bound up in their vision of the

Internet, which they all shared, and the social and cultural impact that it is having on the world.

Thus it is important to describe how they framed their vision, and how it impacted on the OJS and SFU. Thus far I have shown that even though the developers all came to the project in a casual manner, and even though they all preferred to work on the project in a flexible and

178 contractual fashion, they felt that they were contributing towards their vision of what the Internet should be through their open source software work. Their comments regarding their rejection of the commercial world show how much they believed in their vision, while also providing a sense of their vision, which was on the whole rather cohesive. For the developers the Internet was inherently an open, free and public space since, they felt that, as CMP1 states: ―information wants to be free‖. According to CMP1 the Internet facilitates a form of equality, worldwide, that has never before been possible, specifically through the ability to access knowledge and information. He believed that online:

[T]here is a great levelling of society- you don‘t know where someone is coming from,

you don‘t know who they are, what their background is. Bill Gates is equivalent, name

aside to somebody from the Congo for example.

Other developers used terms such as ―democratization (CMP5)‖ and ―decentralization (CMP4)‖ to describe the impact that the Internet and cyberspace were having on the world, which is why they felt that the privatization of the Internet would only be a barrier to this purpose. For CMP5 the Internet was allowing for ―an overall democratization of knowledge coming out of research oriented institutions, mainly, university institutes‖. For CMP4, the more open source software that was available online, the better since ―it‘s the decentralized model that is empowering for individuals to take the tool and become the expert themselves‖. Ultimately for the OJS developers the Internet was increasing and strengthening democracy, freedom and equality, and open source software development was a foundational part of this. This view of the political and social impact the Internet as an equalizing social tool is not exclusively held by the OJS developers. Indeed, it is one of the many potent discourses that has developed and disseminated around notions of the Internet since participation in the Internet has become more widespread,

179 and as the ‗digital divide‘ narrows. Globalization enthusiasts such as Benkler and Friedman, who see the world as becoming ―flatter‖ (2007) also hold these views. Other scholars, particularly those looking at gender issues such as Saskia Sassen (2006) problematize how these ideas have been created, and the extent to which they are true or whether they are myths and assumptions that have arisen based on how the Internet is imagined. What is interesting is that the developers felt that democratization was occurring as they worked on the PKP, and connected it to their own work situation. For them providing scholars with the means to publish their digitally was a part of this democratic shift.

While as I have mentioned, the developers were loyal first to the project as the main organizational structure in their professional lives, they all agreed that there was a strong synergistic relationship between open source software and the contemporary social roles of universities.

I think the culture of experimentation is supposed to be part of every university. How far

they are willing to take that is another question, but I think that ideal of a university is a

benefit to open source software, whether they[universities] recognize it as such is another

question. And I think the thing that works against it would be bureaucracy. (CMP7)

This synergy is based on the notion that open source software development is in and of itself a form of knowledge creation and as one participant explains: ―I mean that‘s our game. For the university, it‘s about knowledge creation‖ (CMP4). This synergy was furthermore strengthened by the function of the project, the publication of online open access journals, and so the entire effect of the PKP/OJS, according to the PKP/OJS team members was part of a larger cultural shift. As CMP5 states:

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I think the fact that John can point to half of the journals out there being in Africa and

South America is a very powerful statement, and I think that is something that OJS and

open source software are facilitating, is that transition, I want to say a shift in power

essentially...

The developers, therefore, saw their work as enabling change. As CMP4 states:

I think it does, I think it can change people‘s lives. I think it is difficult to point to a

dramatic example that‘s particularly useful, but I think it‘s a process that‘s transforming a

culture that happens bit by bit towards letting people in a very concrete way see the

benefits of openness.

While most of the PKP/OJS team members were enthusiastic about the transformational effects of the PKP/OJS, one core developer, who did much of his work in Latin America, expressed his ambivalence about how truly effective the OJS was for change. As he states:

I‘m not sure if promoting…the goal of let‘s say the PKP and the purposes of helping

journalists, people that are trying to present their findings, is a good field that I can get

wholeheartedly behind. I‘m not sure how much…how much good it does in terms of the

bigger picture. (CMP6)

He also admitted however that the project was raising the profile of scientific research for countries that were previously unable to disseminate their research, and ―that‘s something that I have a big interest in especially now that I‘m sort of working in South America and I have aunts and uncles that are university professors. That whole world is excluded from everything; publishing is just one aspect‖. Interestingly, for the PKP/OJS developers, transformation and change translated essentially to the implementation of the OJS software in developing countries.

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And as the project has grown increasingly global, that is, as it has been adopted by more and more institutions around the world, this attitude has become more pervasive. For the team members the ―philosophy of openness‖ which their software system promoted was based on a perspective in which the software‘s value became linked with opening up avenues for universities in the developing world to publish their work, as opposed to, for example strengthening Canadian open access publishing, though admittedly this was important as well.

As one core member of the project explains: ―with the conference this week - that was the whole point - looking at how we can get the delegates of the developing countries involved and finding sponsorships for them; so it is a big part of it‖ (CMP2). As the connection between the OJS and idea of global development has grown stronger, through the adoption of the software, the work of the core developers has become more global.

One indication that developers‘ work has become more global is based on the fact that, increasingly, they travel around the world to help institutions implement the software and to teach them about academic publishing in online environments. As part of a discussion about OJS becoming more more globally oriented, one developer described travelling more for his job. As he explains: ―I think I've been on airplanes more times in the past two years than the total of my life beforehand. Australia this past December and now Michigan next month. The hardest part is keeping my passport up to date. [CMP4] has been a jet-setter for ages, though. Lucky bastard ;-

)‖(CMP3). The developers enjoyed their work in other countries. CMP4 also described increased travel an ongoing part of his job. As he states:

Yes, there is a fair amount of traveling -- I was on the road on average of about once a

month. My schedule for 2008 included Australia, Vancouver, Toronto, Italy, Bulgaria,

and Germany. I've also had numerous remote meetings, presentation, demos, using a

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combination of Skype and ZOHOMeeting. For 2009, I'm booked to go to Indianapolis

and Baltimore so far. I know CMP1 is on his way to Vietnam soon, CMP6 was in South

Africa recently, and, as he is located in Argentina, does a lot of work in South America.

John, of course, is everywhere, all the time.

―Jet setting and globe-trotting‖ (CMP1) have become accepted functions within the role of the

OJS developers, and as such, an important dimension of the identity being described here. I would argue that what developers do on these trips in addition to working with publishers to implement the OJS, is spread the discourses of the PKP/OJS project through common academic circuits such as conferences and workshops. The embodied travel of the developers is how an

DMORPs become global.

6.7 Reproducing the role of the traditional academic

This chapter examines the software developers who were pivotal in creating, designing and disseminating the OJS. My argument is that these developers represent a professional identity that is becoming more commonly present in universities as a result of the growth of digital academic space. In many ways this identity resembles the traditional academic identity of professor: they are male, they are deeply passionate about their work, deriving their identities from it, and they travel to other universities for conferences and seminars. The core developers in this project all held common principles and ideals regarding their work and these connected deeply to their personal identities. They rejected commercialism, challenged the commodification of knowledge, and believed that open source software could participate in the act of increasing global democracy and equality. They identified with academic principles- viewing the university more as a set of ideals, and less as physical place. These developers felt

183 united by their PKP work and the possible social role of the university with growth of digital academic space.

Over the course of this thesis, my aim has been, in part to document and anatomize one open source software project to understand its meaning and significance within the arena of higher education, to understand how it is facilitating change and transformation as well as how it might operate to reproduce existing structures. The OJS developers serve as one of the most interesting aspects, I believe, of my research because of how they illustrate how universities are changing as a result of networked information technologies. They are, for example, indicative of a new form of flexible labour present in the university. They also, I argue, operate to spread language, conventions, symbols and discourses via their work to new places in new ways. But at the same time they reconstitute and reproduce an existing social structure – male cultural transformers - with its attendant and perhaps problematic gender dynamics. How would a critical theorist such as Mohanty interpret this situation? The gender implications – academic open source software development as a ‗brotherhood‘ of sorts- associated with this professional identity, which is growing and proliferating as digital academic space becomes more important to the university, shows how even in the most progressive and open activist movements, subconscious patriarchal structures persist.

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Figure 8. Screenshot of the OJS journal Ethics and Global Politics.

Ethics & Global Politics is an Open Access, peer reviewed scholarly journal published by Co-Action Publishing with support from The Swedish Research Council, The Swedish Council for Working Life and Social Research and the Department of Political Science at Stockholm University, Sweden. Ethics & Global Politics looks to foster theoretical contributions to the study of global politics by providing a forum for presenting novel ways of understanding and conceptualizing the global political challenges the world faces today.

From ―About the journal‖, Ethics and Global Politics, www.ethicsandglobalpolitics.net.

Chapter 7: Roguish Behaviour: A Snapshot of OJS Users

In the previous chapter I describe and explore the core developers of the PKP/OJS project, arguing that they are a reconstituted professional identity in the university as result of information technology. Within the boundaries of this thesis, this professional identity is one of the characteristics of DMORPs: these projects are created, managed and directed by these professionals. These professionals, men, with a preference for flexible employment, who hold strong beliefs in the principles of free information, are at once changing and reproducing the social structure of the contemporary university.

In this chapter, I provide support for another branch of my argument which outlines the conditions relating to a new sphere of activity in which universities are engaging. As universities participate and collaborate in digital academic space, digitally mediated open research projects are becoming areas of global academic action. The core developers‘ perspectives, while central to an understanding of the OJS only describe one side of this multifaceted phenomenon. Here I examine the perspectives and experiences of the OJS users. I begin with a meta-view of the responses of users to the email questionnaire, and continue with a description of the effects of users‘ journals. Ultimately, for many of the users who participated in this research study, OJS projects were accomplished generally, without the knowledge, consent or encouragement of high level university administrators, in a non-strategic and experimental fashion. While an important condition of DMORPs is that they are fluid and dynamic, the experimental attitude that the OJS users held could be considered an important element of these emerging organizations forms.

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In many of our conversations, the OJS developers discussed their perceptions regarding OJS users. These perceptions were based mainly on their online interactions with users from email correspondences and from their interactions on user forums, although some of the developers had in-person experiences in their travels where they held education and outreach workshops for the software, or at the PKP/OJS conference where the research interviews took place. When asked who the OJS users were, CMP4 explained:

They are people who have a burning passion about their topic and they want to share that

and create a new way of developing that knowledge. But I‘m not convinced that all of

them know what they have gotten themselves into.

According to CMP6, the OJS users are:

A very supportive community of users; people who are generally keen and grateful for

what‘s available. They‘re keen to use it and they‘re grateful for anything that comes out

of it. You get that sense mainly in the forums because that‘s where you touch base with

the people.

As CMP7, an SFU library administrator, explains, the users and their journals are:

fairly new journals and they would have one or two issues out per year. These guys are

slow, they don‘t really have…they‘re volunteers and they don‘t really have budgets so…I

think a couple of them don‘t have anything out yet but they‘re really excited and they‘re

really enthusiastic (CMP7).

The lead developer held similar opinions. As he explained:

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If you look at the way a lot of journals come about, I think it‘s often a particularly driven

or visionary researcher or academic that decides there‘s a gap here in the literature that

somebody needs to fill it or that you do have a new kind of interdisciplinary, I think,

research area emerging all the time and it often is just one very persistent and eager

person that generates it. (CMP1)

According to the OJS developers, the OJS users were eager, determined, and generally resource poor when it came to the larger institutionalized support for their OJS work. As is common with many Internet based projects, the core members of the PKP/OJS project imagined their users as an enthusiastic group with have limited resources to publish academic journals, limited technical skills, and a sincere belief in the opening up and development of knowledge. The question is: how accurate are the perceptions of developers regarding the PKP/OJS users?

Through conversations with core users as well as responses to the email questionnaires it became clear that OJS users are a diverse group. This diversity was based not only on geographic dispersal, but also on professional roles, organizational and disciplinary affiliations, and technical literacy skills. At the same time, all of users published peer reviewed academic research, even if their research themes and methods could be considered less traditional by some academic standards, and in some cases, despite a lack of financial and technical resources.

In this research study, I defined an OJS user as someone who worked directly on the publication of one or more electronic journals. Those who coordinated larger scale projects in which the OJS was a main tool were designated as core users even if they did not work directly on the production of a journal. As an example of the latter, four of the face to face participants who have been named core users were representatives of initiatives aimed at using the software to

188 develop open access publishing in their geographic region. They acted as facilitators and technology managers between PKP core developers and editors or journals and dealt with the technical management for the production of numerous installations of the OJS, including the development of training workshops to help disseminate and implement the journals in their geographic region. As I shall show below, unlike editors and journal managers, the core users did contribute some code to the development of the second version of the OJS, however none of the core users were academics, researchers or professors. Two of the core users worked for academic institutions, while the others worked for non-profits whose aim was to increase access to academic information in different parts of the world. Four out five of the core users were from outside of Canada, one from Brazil, two were from different areas of South Africa, and one, who worked for an African journal project, from England. The other user groups involved in this project were editors or journal managers, some of whom were university professors, some of whom were students and some of whom were librarians or information specialists. This range, from editor to manager or coordinator, between student and professor, represents to a greater extent the more typical PKP/OJS users, who had greater contact and involvement with the actual production of journals both in terms of content and technical production.

7.1 Overview of user responses to the email questionnaire

I distilled the detailed responses from the 32 users to the email questionnaires into generalized responses in order to understand more about this disparate group of software users. What follows is an overview of user responses to the email questionnaire based on the following themes: how the software is managed or which unit is responsible for its management; why users chose to use the OJS to manage their journal; how they found OJS; whether they customized the OJS and if they encountered any bugs while using the OJS, and whether they reported bugs and changes

189 back to the PKP team; references to being a part of an OJS community, and references to their use of the PKP forums.

7.1.1 Journal management

Fourteen out of thirty respondents started their journals as new journals within the OJS publishing software, while seven of the journals were moved into the software transforming them from a previously existing electronic journal, and seven were moved into it from a traditional subscription based print journal format. I asked users about how they managed the OJS at their organization where the notion of management encapsulated everything from finding a server on which to download the software, accommodating glitches, and re-coding or customizing its look and feel. The responses from users around this issue were varied: eleven took on managing the software themselves, twelve reported that the software was administered by a library- SFU in four of those cases, five users reported that their organization‘s information technology services managed the software, two reported that their journal was managed as part of a digital publishing initiative -separate from their library, and one user cited her ―research department‖ as the group that managed the technical aspects of her journal. One user employed a proprietary vendor to manage the journal‘s administration.

Interestingly, all of the journals that were managed by the respondents themselves were new journals housed in the OJS system, save one which existed for a brief period time as an online journal. I interpret as evidence of new knowledge produced and disseminated as a result of access to the OJS, and connect the availability of the software to the birth of new ideas. As one user explained when asked what he would have done without the OJS: ―I would have lived in the land of little hope‖, meaning his journal would not have existed without the software system.

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Table 5 OJS Journals: Previous Format, Management, Funding

Previous format:

Print Electronic Born OJS Combined

9 7 13 2

How managed:

Self Library IT services SFU Library

9 8 8 4

Funded:

Yes No NA Other revenue

5 21 5 1

The connection between the OJS and the birth of new journals, and by extension new knowledge, may be reinforced by the notion that all of the print journals involved in this study were supported and managed by a centralized service- either a library, a department or IT services. This may indicate that journals that were published in print form prior to moving into the OJS had an infrastructure associated with them so that there were structures in place for their electronic support. Born OJS journals, starting from scratch, were pulled together in a more spontaneous manner. This connection, I believe, supports the PKP developer‘s notion of the eager and determined user.

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Those journals that existed previously were managed in a more formal fashion, while new journals were managed by those people who produced the journal‘s content directly. Only one of these new OJS born journals received substantial funding, ―[our university] provided us with

$14, 000 start-up funds to get it going‖, while one other ‗born OJS‘ journal received some

―minor funding‖. Overall, very few of the journals received any funding at all. As U6 states: ―we have a 0 budget‖, which means, in essence that much of the work is done on a voluntary basis.

This of course does not mean that funding was not desired by those involved in OJS projects as some users mentioned attempts to secure some form of funding. As Canadian editor U8 describes: ―our proposals are not completed yet. I wanted to apply to the SSHRC serial publications fund, but they required at least 4 issues and we are a biannual journal at this point...if this fund wants to support new journals, they should change this requirement in my view, because now is the time when we need the funds to set up the journal!‖. And as another

Canadian journal editor explains:

We still need to spend time formatting papers to fit our "look," and we need to hire a

person part time to deal with the journal. So we cannot survive without a SSHRC grant,

and we haven't yet heard whether we will get one. It was our impression that going online

was key to getting SSHRC support, but the jury is still out. (U11)

Others were denied funding: ―We use the open-access model and charge authors by the article.

We applied for a grant and were turned down‖ (U28). Based on the responses of the users who participated in this research study, users tend to be involved in the management of the software on their own, and receive, on the whole, no funding from their organization. The story of these

OJS users is that they produce their journals in an independent fashion, as a part of their

192 academic activities. This is particularly true for those users who created their journals within the

OJS software.

7.1.2 Reasons for choosing the OJS

One of the preliminary themes of this research project was to look at academic open source software projects in terms of how they are managed, how they conform to the mythologized idea of open source software projects that is common in the literature, and how they affect the reputation of the institutions that are involved in their development. I therefore asked users to discuss and describe the reasons behind why they chose to use the OJS, and how they discovered the system. Sixteen of the users cited open source as the main reason behind their choice of the

OJS, while four of those users also explained that open access was also an important factor. Ten of the users chose it because it was free (no cost associated with it). As U11 explains: ―the OS aspect was less important while the fact that it was free was more important‖. Two users chose the software because, above all, it was specific to academic publishing and is the best on the market. Two users cited specifically their wish to be involved in Open Access (as opposed to open source as the driving reason), and one respondent chose it because it was offered as a service by his library. Exactly half of the users had experience with some sort of open source software (some cited e-prints which is open access digital repository software, as this experience), while the other half had no open source experience. The following tables show which users had previous experience with an open source software system, why users chose the

OJS, and how they found the software.

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Table 6 OJS Users: Reasons, Experience, Discovery of the Software

Prior Experience:

No Yes NA

18 13 1 Reasons for choosing the OJS:

OS Free OA Best Software

12 8 6 4 How users found the software:

Web search Word of mouth Through JW Other

14 10 6 2

The majority of users discovered the system from a web search when they were looking for publishing software, nine users found the software based on a colleague‘s use of it, six users began using it based on having met project founder John Willinsky, one respondent began using the software after a vendor recommended it, and one non-North America user, who was ―active in the open access movement in India‖ (U23) found the software based on an educational seminar held by the PKP team in his geographic region. What is interesting about these responses is that both web searches and word of mouth advertising which I consider as grassroots activities were overwhelmingly dominant as the mode by which users adopted the software. This underscores the notion that the majority of the OJS journals, at the time that this research was conducted, were not initiated in a formalized (top down) manner (i.e. their institution encouraged them to use the software), and gives credence to the idea that OJS activities are often ‗under the radar‘ of many university administrations. It also recalls, on some

194 level, the notion of the condition of publicity, described in the earlier literature review of higher education. The web creates a space in which those involved in the use of the software become available in a public way- they can be found online and a public image is created for users, their institutions and also for the institutions of developers and core users. This presents another space of contradiction since OJS users can be found online- and are inhabiting the condition of publicity while at the same time are under the radar.

As the above tables indicate, many of the users chose to adopt the OJS because it was an open source system. Those users who cited this as the main reason behind their decision to employ the

OJS appreciated that the system was open source for different reasons. U11 explained that her organization found the software system after a colleague submitted a paper to a journal that was using it. Her institution was in the process of employing a consulting group to handle the development of a software system for publishing their journals, but after having found the OJS, they decided to re-develop it to suit their processes. As she states: ―we wanted it to be open source if possible. Because that‘s easiest for us; everything we do is open and we don‘t have huge amounts of funding so that fits in with our philosophy‖ (U11). U14 responded in a similar way: ―[our university] is an open university and open source software and open access publishing all fit with our philosophy. Whenever possible, we try to utilize an open source solution‖. As U17 explains ―we chose it because it was open source, but open source would not have been sufficient: we additionally appreciated the worldwide use of OJS and the existence of a vivid community of developers‖. For many of the users, open source signified not only access to the source code and possibilities for redevelopment, or a system that was free (that cost no money). As with the core PKP/OJS developers users saw the open source factor as operating

―synergistically‖ with the projects‘ support for open access. They viewed it as a larger movement

195 in the development of free information. U23 for example, declared that he was a major supporter of open access in India, and chose the OJS based on his belief in open access along with open source. What I believe this shows is that users engaged in and adopted similar discourses about the OJS software as the core developers. This in turn speaks, to some degree, to their motivations behind producing their OJS projects which in many cases extended beyond producing a journal simply for the sake of enabling the distribution of its content.

7.1.3 Customizations and bug reporting

One of the benefits of open source software is that with its source code freely available users can easily modify the software to fit their needs. In light of this benefit, I asked users whether they made modifications and customizations to the software, and whether or not they shared their modifications with the PKP team. The notion of contributing back to the software‘s development is often interpreted as an indication of a strong user community within the open source software development paradigm. It is therefore a meaningful act. As table 4.3 indicates, the majority of

OJS users took advantage of the fact that the software was open and customized or ‗localized‘ the software. Only six of the users who adopted the software used it in an ‗out of the box‘ manner- that is, with no customizations. Nine of the respondents encountered a bug while setting up and using the system, and eight of these users reported either a customization or a bug back to the PKP team. Only two out of the thirty two respondents contributed an actual piece of code, and those contributions were language related.

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Table 7 Customizations and Bug Reporting by OJS Users

Customization Encountered bugs Reported bugs

Yes 21 9 8

No 8 21 17

Not available 4 2 7

Some of the respondents to my survey explained why they did not contribute their fixes and codes back to the OJS team. As they explained the changes they made to the software that would have been relevant globally showed up in a later version of the software, while other changes that they made had no relevance to the entire user community. This raises the idea that there is a difference according to users between a code contribution and a customization, much of which tend to be either or aesthetic or related to existing software systems at their institution. As an example, U8 who worked closely with the PKP team, and was ―thrilled‖ with their support for her journal hired an outside development company to handle the graphic design – the customization- of her journal. According to her, the changes that she made were related to tweaking the design of the OJS, which many users agree has a specific layout and look. For this user, there was no conflict or tension between hiring a private designer who did not ‗contribute changes back‘ to the PKP team and her belief in and support for open source software or the

PKP.

Considering users responses above, the argument can be made that while users took advantage of the fact that the code was open, the reciprocity of code contributions amongst this user group was minimal. As one user explains, his changes were ―minor changes related to customization,

197 hence not reported back to OJS Team‖ (U23). Thus the question is: how defining are code contributions to the open source software process within the academic context? When asked about whether he made contributions in relation to the OJS one user, a professor, replied: ―No, not yet, but I plan to. Some points need fine tuning, for example the decision options which are very limited. I think some short documentation on playing with the code (and not only using the system) would be very helpful‖ (U19). Participation in the code development for some was an ideal, specifically for those users who were familiar with the story of open source software. It was something some users wanted to take part in, but had limited time or resources to pursue.

Others held different opinions about involvement. As U11 explains: ―OJS is not typical open source software...it is more like free source proprietary software, as development does not appear to be promoted beyond the OJS team and there is no easily discernable community of programmers working on OJS‖. These attitudes and responses are critical to the narrative of the

OJS in which the idea of participative user is integral. In reality, these OJS users were connected by the idea of participation more than its reality and this condition is common within discussions regarding the possibilities and potency of online community building. This speaks, furthermore, to the limits of leveling society through Internet involvement.

7.1.4 Belonging to an OJS community and participation in the user forums

Typically code contributions are an important community building element within an open source community. However, at the time that my research was conducted, amongst my respondents, code contributions were not common. What then was at the root of the OJS software community? My respondents reported that they felt that they did belong to a community as result of publishing via OJS, and some cited the PKP forum as a source of their OJS

198 community involvement. As U21 states: ―the PKP community is great and that can be seen on the forum. PKP has started a blog on OJS which I think complements the forum, but needs more input from the community‖. Ten of the users in this study participated in the forums – but not all of them felt this represented, necessarily, community participation; two of the users admitted that they did not feel like a part of a larger community. As U32, who had participated in the forums explained: ―I'm not sure I feel part of that larger community. No time, really, to get involved or participate. I suppose I feel an affinity with all those other folks - solidarity in a commitment to a cause- open access.‖ The open access connection to the OJS community is an important one since, as CU[9] explains:

If you manage to get people to accept open source software, it‘s alot easier for them to

accept open access. They already understand the concept of openness and freedom and

sharing. I think it‘s more difficult if you come in without them understanding that

concept. If you present it to them and go, well we want you to put your content online so

everyone can access it without giving you anything people tend to go, ―Oh no‖. But if

they already have the concept from open source, then it‘s alot easier.

Based on the responses of some of the participants in this study, the main adhesive behind the

OJS community was less about the software development/ re-development, and more about spreading the ethic of free information. Thus it was a discursive and ideological bond. CU9 above was describing the situation in Africa as she explained university administrators had not accepted the concept of going open- or even digital with university developed content. In her explanation of South African attitudes, she points out how important it is for the discourse of openness to gain momentum for free and open culture to be accepted in her country. Thus being active in the area of open information was a point of connection for OJS users. As U21 states in

199 reference to being part of the OJS community: ―I'm aware that there are others who have similar values regarding open source, open access, free scholarship etc...‖. Ultimately, simply using the

PKP/OJS software was not the main ingredient in the OJS user community. Rather, it was how the OJS software contributed to the promotion of opening up access to information.

While this was true for many of the users in this study, other users felt they needed more to be considered part of a community. The PKP project team recognized the need for a community building activity where OJS users and user-developers could meet offline and in-person. This was part of the reasoning behind the PKP conference. In their responses to my questionnaire, some users mentioned that the conference, which had just ended, signified to them that the OJS was more than just a group of open source software users.

Table 8 User Responses: Community, Forum Participation, Effects

User Community Forum Other

U1 Y N

U2 Y N

U3 Y, more contacts N

U4 Y, PKP team N

U5 Y, relationships N

U6 N Benefit developing countries

U7 Y, wants to develop more community N

U8 Y N Help from PKP team in set up.

U9 Y, conference indicative N Documented OJS transition in peer reviewed journal.

U10 N

U11 Y, increased professional Y

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User Community Forum Other relationships

U12 Y, Intl contacts Y Developed RTL lang. Module

U13 Y, OA for developing world N Worked with JW early on (initial version). Wrote about experiences.

U14 Y, new relationships N

U15 Y N

U16 N Y

U17 Y, one email congrats fellow user N Contributed to Germ. Language module

U18 Y, received email from a fellow user, N globally distributed

U19 Y, via forums Y

U20 -- N

U21 Y, via forums Y

U22 Y, wider readership N

U23 Y, talk to other users about OJS and Y Active OA advocate in India. OA publishing

U24 Y, bound by OSS, OA, FS N

U25 No N

U26 Y Y

U27 Y, OJS users bound through OA N

U28 Y, PKP support Y

U29 Y, communicates w other OJS users. Y Tech related.

U30 N, wants to develop communication N

U31 N N

U32 N; ―affinity‖ towards each other. Y

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7.1.5 Technical skills levels of PKP/OJS users

As I discussed in my literature review about open source software, typically, a user is often also a developer. That is, the production of open source software is different in the way that those who use it have the ability to modify and change it, and often become user-developers. This of course raises a host of other questions and issues, not least of which is about the type if labour

(free, flexible) that characterized by the user-developer. The user-developer concept also tends to position a user as someone with a sophisticated technical skills set. They know, for example, some programming languages and have the abilities to go into the source code of a program, and modify the way the program functions. At the same time, the typical image of an academic is as that of a luddite, with little interest or abilities in the realm of internet literacy, and with low technical skill levels. Thus I was interested in the skills levels of OJS users.

The technical skill level of my respondents connects to a range of issues in relation to the

PKP/OJS software. Users with more advanced skill levels were more involved in the development of their journal, and had a greater range and degree of options when it came to thinking about the design of their journal, and the functionality of its back end (the workflows and editorial processes that they put in place to manage the various directions of submissions).

Many of the user‘s involved in this study described making local modifications to the software on their own. As U23 explains ―I do quite a bit of the technical work myself‖. Most of these changes revolved around altering an aesthetic characteristic of the software‘s layout, such as adding an extra link or button, or around tuning a back end work process to fit the processes of the journal production, for example adjusting whether an editor sent an email to authors upon submission of a manuscript to the journal, or even skipping over certain processes. As U28, a professor of philosophy explains: ―I made the changes. We altered the CSS documents, the

202 template documents, and the PHP documents‖, and as U2, a mathematics professor describes: ―I have patched some of the scripts and templates myself. In particular, the OJS sources were not completely adapted to handle non-English names and affiliations‖. For many of the respondents, altering code was a part of using the software. Some of the users who made local modifications even displayed a relaxed and playful attitude towards OJS code redevelopment. As U5, also a professor explains: ―I could not now tell you what I have changed! But I know I spent hundreds of hours messing about with it. I do quite a bit of the technical work myself‖. These responses speak to the new technical skill levels that academics themselves are developing as part of their academic work, as part, that is, of their active participation in the re-distribution of their ideas. It also speaks to the way academic labour is changing, and how the free labour of Internet work is encroaching on academic work. It begs the question: are these the skill sets that academics are required to develop as digital academic space grows?

Other users adapted the software with the help of available technical resources. As user 29, a post doctoral fellow from Taiwan explains: ―we customized some code for our journal. At first, we did it with the document[ation] and try & error. Then, we acquired the help from a[n] IT student from our university‖. U6, a professor from Hong Kong described a similar situation:

―[customizations were] done by the webmaster for the journal, a technical research assistant‖.

Other users also reported drawing on existing services within their organizations to code for local modifications. As U9, a coordinator from the Philippines describes: ―several customization[s] have been done for this journal by our own IT staff‖, and U27 explains: ―a technology management group in my department [made the changes]‖. While using OJS in an ‗out of the box fashion‘ is possible, for those users whose journals existed in a previous format, this was more difficult since workflow processes already existed, as did previous journal issues. Creating

203 a coherent look and feel between journals was important, and these tasks were often performed by existing IT services within the organization. U10 explains that ―we used a designer from our

Web Publishing Branch to 'skin' the service and the journals‖, referring to the process used to create a continuum between her libraries‘ journals. U14, a coordinator at a Canadian university, was part of a dedicated program that dealt with online publishing initiatives, and so worked with a developer who was on her team. Still others worked with their university library to launch their journals, including users 3, 11, 22 and 26. One respondent however, was skeptical of his university library‘s capacity for supporting his journal. As he states: ―I manage it myself. There was some talk of hosting it by one of our libraries but after speaking with them I was not confident in their offer‖ (U5). The SFU library, understanding that some users would need help establishing an OJS journal created a program to provide technical assistance to some of the journals that they hosted on their servers that were not necessarily SFU journals, and some users reported having worked directly with the PKP/OJS team to set up, localize and modify their journals. This was the case for users 4 and 8. One user, U18, worked with a proprietary vendor who found and recommended the OJS for their journal to set it up.

While for some users, such as U24, who ―had no need to call on OJS/PKP team for set up‖ and

―have had very little need for support since‖, OJS set up was a straightforward affair, for others, technical issues, and finding support to solve these issues, proved to be the greatest obstacle. One

CU, a web developer from South America, explained that most journals from his region did not have such resources available to them, and that centralized IT services at his institution were often suspicious of new software initiatives. As he described:

Most of the universities don‘t have [IT support]. There‘s a divide within the university.

The departments don‘t talk to each other, the IT department doesn‘t talk to anybody, and

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they don‘t want anything new because they know it‘s trouble. The [OJS software is]

something that they did not make, they‘re not aware of the security issues so and there‘s

no support for them. I mean they cannot rely on [the PKP team] because they don‘t speak

English, so they have to rely on us. So we are the support for the whole community and

we are a team of four and none of us is a programmer.

Indeed, this issue of support for the PKP/OJS project was so great, that this core user-developer learned to program and develop OJS and provided dedicated support for OJS journals not only for his university, but for his entire region. This is how he evolved into a CU, and created one of the largest language contributions. Importantly, his role at his university was to provide technical support to help academics create electronic resources for their research and their lectures. He was therefore well suited to take on learning how to code and adapt the OJS, and become an ―OJS ambassador‖ for his region. His country‘s government began mandating full open access to academic research produced by his countries universities. This core user‘s role is interesting in the way it seems to fall in line with the professional identity described in the previous chapter. I would argue that his position represents how academic software developers (a.k.a independent consultants) are becoming more prevalent in universities. Their work is becoming a part of academic work even though they do not produce the content. This suggests that code contributions are not taken on, as often, by those who are involved with content. This is reinforced by the comments of CU9, an open source software developer from a university in

South Africa. She explained that her role in relation to the OJS project was:

To use [the project] as a support for OJS, so set up OJS in a university where they already

have the support available. It‘s built using the same basic server that they run for our

code. So anyone who works for [her project] would have few problems switching and

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supporting OJS. This way they would have a footleg into the university and they

wouldn‘t have to go in and try and persuade, they already have someone on their side.

That is why they are trying to bring [my project] in.

The PKP team recognized the need to form strategic alliances not with content developers for the

OJS, but rather with software developers as a means to not only disseminate the software, but to attempt to disperse the act of code creation.

7.1.6 University support for OJS journals

In my research, I felt that the issue of technology support, either by a centralized IT group or by a library, was important because I felt it captured whether OJS journals were produced independently, or with the journal publisher‘s university‘s knowledge and backing. According to the respondents in this study, technical support was handled in different ways. U3, a librarian who headed up several journals, felt that his ―administration was supportive‖ since ―we also host the [University‘s] Undergraduate Research Journal which is a priority for administration‖, although he did not specific precisely how support was manifested. Overall, according to the users that participated in this study, the supportiveness of universities towards an OJS project was determined mainly by the resources offered towards its production. In other words, if universities provided IT services, technical resources, or funding for a journal, users felt that their OJS work was important. U6, as an example, describes how his university was supportive by ―providing the server and allowing me to use my time - in reasonable quantities‖. As U7 describes: ―U of Washington sponsors the journal and acts as publisher. They provide the financial, organization, and network infrastructure. People who work on the journal are [our university‘s] employees‖. And, as U2 illustrates: ―we rely on the general web infrastructure that

206 my lab provides, that is http and database servers. The OJS software itself (scripts and templates) is maintained by me. We do not have direct funding, but the mentioned web services provided‖.

Some universities did provide direct funding and financial support such as with U8, and U13 explains that he ―received two Minor Research Grants to manage the journal‖. These cases, however, were in the minority. Some users were disappointed with the level of enthusiasm around their OJS projects. When U6, for example, was asked about whether there were any plans at his university to adopt the OJS on a larger scale, he responded: ―I don't think so, but even if it did, I wouldn't know - there is no attempt to build on synergies of any kind‖. Ultimately, based on the responses to the email questionnaire, I saw a connection between tangible resources and the idea of university support despite the argument that OJS journals, because they are created in an open source software environment need very little in terms of resources. In other words, it is feasible to launch an OJS journal with very few resources, how publishers feel more supported and valued when they have more with which to work.

Of course, not all of the users felt supported in their OJS initiatives. In fact, as shown above, nearly half of the users in this study worked on their journals without the backing (or knowledge) of their university‘s administration. U5 explains how his university was ambivalent towards his

OJS publication: ―on one level they could not care less and they certainly are not forthcoming with funds or any useful assistance, however, the managers often use it to highlight the good work their department is doing! A fairly typical scenario‖. And as U28 explains: ―[my co-editor] and I manage it by ourselves. We have little or no support from our own or any outside institution‖. U12 states further:

Although they like to support our journals but actually this does not happen so much: we

need to have more people supervising the contents of articles prior to publication. Our

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editors, reviewers, journal office staff do not have the required skills. The majority of our

Editors and reviewers need extensive education to become able to edit and review papers.

All of these required money which the university is not supportive of, or cannot be

supportive of. The reason why they are not supportive mainly is lack of understanding of

the importance of the work and giving less priority to publishing a journal in Iran.

U12 points to a recurring issue in the above statements: that big impediment for OJS publishers, as well as for those who support electronic open access is a mindset that is difficult to penetrate.

U12‘s statements resonate with CU9‘s description above. Some users were even reluctant to add their university affiliation onto their journal web site, not out fear that their university would not approve of the content or in their involvement in the journal, but rather because they did not want any of the publicity to be attributed to their university.

Overall, the technical skills of the thirty two respondents involved in this study ranged. Some users were able to customize the code themselves, while others either relied on the technical support available to them through their institution, or expressed a sincere need for more support.

At the same time however, there was a minimum skill level that was held by all users. As an example, all of the users knew what was meant by the terms open source, and furthermore understood the implications of using an open source software system to publish their journals- that is many knew they could customize and change the system because of having access to the source code. Users were also familiar with the technical needs associated with the system, such as the need for server space for set up. Many users immediately connected the principles of open source software to the principles of open access publishing, obfuscating the differences between the movements. This suggests that their knowledge of the movements had been, at minimum, filled in by the PKP teams‘ ideas and discourses.

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7.2 Roadblocks, criticisms, and effects of involvement with the PKP/OJS project

The majority of users were satisfied with the support provided by the OJS team. As U4, an editor whose organization had multiple journals on the OJS system describes:

We certainly did -- before I was the General Editor, I was the Technical Coordinator, and

I and the Exec Director had regular and ongoing contact with the entire OJS/PKP team at

Simon Fraser. They were incredibly helpful! Problems were dealt with promptly and

efficiently, and we were able to even explore aspects of the OJS software that were

needed for our 32 year old journal, but not necessarily adaptable to newer journals.

And as U8, a professor at the SFU explains in her experience of creating her new journal:

Credit should go to the library and to [one of the core members of the PKP team] who

helped me through this process. I am not a librarian, my knowledge of web design is

zip....it would not have happened without this valuable resource!!! and we thank him for

it.....please publish his name as the CRITICAL component of this process...I would have

given up without his support.

And as U16 describes:

We had some problems when installing the OJS software at a server of our university. All

problems were solved by the PKP team. The direct support from the PKP team is perfect.

Occasionally we also conducted the support forum, which is of some help.

However one user expressed frustration in relation to the support he received from the PKP team.

As he states:

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We have called on the OJS/PKP team on many occasions. The support has been less than

ideal. We continue to experience problems - in fact, our problems have increased and we

don't get much help in having them solved. (U32)

Another respondent from China was experiencing trouble communicating with developers asked me to: ―please introduce me to some technicians from OJS and other good OJS users, so that I can ask for help, and present suggestions on improving OJS‖ (30). The question of support in relation to open source software is often the most difficult to resolve as many of these systems provide minimal support mechanisms, and have a user group that has low expectations for support and high technical skill levels- or so the story goes. The user group of the PKP was quite different. Even though users were somewhat technically literate, the OJS team provided high levels of support since they understood the resource constraints of their users, and viewed technical support as integral to the ―success‖ of the porject. Here I recall the attitudes of PKP developers who loved the idea that open source software development was empowering to its users and afforded a ―do it yourself‖ attitude, even though their perceptions of the users was that they did not have enough experience with technology to be totally ―their own‖. The reality of

OJS users was that support was incredibly important.

7.2.1 Roadblocks and criticisms

While for many of the OJS users who took part in this study the OJS was the ―best on the market‖ in terms of publishing software some users did describe some non-support related problems. As an example, a few users complained that though they themselves were able to use the OJS without problems, their own users- that is authors and reviewers - experienced difficulties with the back end interface of the system. As U14 recounts: ―transitioning to OJS has

210 had its ups and downs. There has been a learning curve for us as well as for our journal managers. The documentation is not very clear, so we tend to receive numerous questions about how things work and how to setup certain features, etc. The system is not very intuitive, so it does take some time to learn the ins and outs of it‖. This issue was connected to the skill and tolerance levels of the extended user groups which consisted of authors, editors and reviewers who often already feel that since they are volunteering their time and efforts, they should not be required to learn something new. As U16 describes: ―there are users [reviewers and authors] who refuse to work with an online management environment‖. And as U22, who has technical support from his university recounts:

We are still learning how to use it. We were given a couple of briefings by the Associate

University Librarian, who is quarterbacking the transition to OJS by journals at [a

Canadian university]. She has been most helpful. Some (but not all) reviewers have had

problems logging on, so I infer these problems may be of their own making. Initially a

few people who wanted to register as readers had problems, but relatively few (say 10 out

of over 600).

Most of the roadblocks that users reported had to do usability issues related to their own users.

According to U32, who voiced his critique regarding PKP support explains:

We find that authors and reviewers have very little patience with glitches. For some

reason, we've had password problems, and we've lost reviewers who have grown so

frustrated with the system that they've declined the request to review.

And as U25 states: ―Now, my wish list for OJS is short: I sincerely hope they will devote more attention to the user interface, in particular those parts that reviewers and authors meet. But even

211 editors (in particular guest editors) get confused and overlook some essential steps in the usage of the system‖.

OJS journals are often marked with a specific look and feel, and users have described ways of circumventing this look and feel through customizations. Many of the respondents in this study undertook customizations for their journals. Along this vein, users expressed concerns regarding the design and layout of OJS journals. As U5 explains: ―I can't customize everything that I would like to. Sometimes the processes seem unnecessarily complicated. There is a North American flavour to some of the default options that I dislike‖. U6 worries that ―on-line journals get their identity from design and OJS even with a creative person working on the Cascading Stylesheet

Sheet (CSS) [it] is limited in terms of the layout‖. U8, who had customized the look of her journal explains:

It needs to become more flexible in presentation...we love the way our journal is set

up...as a result of making it a professional looking journal, we attracted well-known

scholars who have submitted articles worldwide. I think that if we had kept it in the OJS

basic format, the scholars would have remained within our circle of colleagues and would

not have established the interdisciplinary aspect of the journal that we were hoping to and

successfully created.

Ultimately, while some users might have felt that the look of OJS journals unites them within the

OJS community, others felt overly branded by the system‘s look and feel. These statements are interesting because they show that, in a sense, being ―grateful‖ is not necessarily a defining characteristic of some OJS users.

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7.2.2 Effects of using the PKP/OJS

Many of the respondents felt that working with the OJS software initiated them into a community, the nature of which was undetermined and unelaborated by some, but for others had to do with the progress of a movement towards open information. When I asked about the effects of using the software, some of the respondents described new opportunities for collaboration and partnerships. U8 explained how it was ―linking ideas of researchers worldwide‖, while U14, who did believe she inhabited a new community as result of her use of the software explained that:

―working with our various journals and with the PKP-OJS folks has opened up a whole new community where new relationships have developed. It has been "fun". Still others felt that their use of the OJS increased the value of their work because of the good publicity that resulted from its use. As one editor explained: ―our journal is now a well-established journal in our community, and well ranked among math and Computer Science journals‖ and that this was an

―effect of using the PKP/OJS‖ (U2). In a similar vein, another user explained that ―we are under the impression that our journal is being read more widely, and has greater recognition, as a result of being available free online. And as a result of the publicity we distributed to various listservs related to our field‖ (U22). This user also connected these effects directly to the PKP/OJS.

Another user reports on a more surprising effect of using the PKP/OJS. As she explains: ―we are also finding a huge interest in the journal from areas (i.e. academic disciplines) that we hadn't seen before‖ (U4). However one user was a little more skeptical. As U22 explains:

It is too early to say whether this venture has been a success for us. We are publishing

more papers than we did in the past, and we are receiving more submissions, including

more potentially publishable submissions. But the process is still a bit cumbersome for

us.

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Many of the respondents framed the effects of using the software not only as a means to increase publishing efficiencies and reduce publication costs, which are two of the more obvious effects, but also in terms of the social, reputational and epistemological effects of using the software..

7.2.3 OJS users work towards „development‟

According to some of the users, the effects of their OJS journals were manifesting within academic communities in the global south, furthering the cause of global development through open information. This occurred on two levels. In the first effects were felt as access to scholarly information was provided to researchers and scholars in the global south. In support of this notion, the editor of one journal explains that his journal ―is primarily an altruistic effort for the benefit of people living in developing countries, as well as others interested in the topic. We don't charge fees of any kind‖. Another user, U8, explains that the content of his journal ―targets scholars in developing countries‖ for which few existing channels of scholarly information are relevant.

The second category of development oriented effects of the OJS was cultivated as scholars in the developing world were being provided with a public venue for their own research. This seemed to be a more important goal for the PKP developers and some of the users. As U6 explains: ―it is a way to give these people [scholars in the developing world] a voice‖. Canadian user U13, describes how her ―journal has opened up avenues of publication to scholars world-wide, especially in the developing countries where funding for publishing is scarce and resources are few, let alone the distribution which is abysmal‖. While open access on the larger level is to provide free access to scientific and scholarly information globally, one of the goals of the OJS, as it has evolved over the years, as more users world-wide have adopted the software, is to

214 provide a means and a space to scholars previously cut out of the publishing network, as Altbach

(1998) shows, who are generally located the global south. However as users connect their OJS work to the cause of ―global development‖ and to benefit the ―developing world‖, we need to question how we might think critically about their construction and positioning of the

―developing world‖. Thus, one question might be: what type of ‗othering‘ occurs in the positioning of ―developing world scholars‖ as the open information network grows, and begins to include those who have been traditionally disenfranchised?

The provision of a space for relevant local knowledge was the intention behind the adoption of the OJS by CU11 who was a member of a British organization dedicated to improving academic publishing in Africa. The point of her project was to find a way to disseminate African research within the African continent to strengthen African countries‘ use of their own scholarly work.

The reason why she chose to adopt the OJS was because, as she explained:

It‘s not that we wanted to be able to develop [the OJS] ourselves, but we were thinking

that in the future the journals themselves could take it, and it would be so much easier if

they were able to use the source [code] if they wanted to. I mean the whole idea is [our

organization] is empowering…the idea is it‘s an empowerment process. We‘re creating

something that can be sustainable that we can give back to Africa because that was the

whole idea – although, [our organization] started it because of the problem of starting

something that is inter-country; it is difficult. But once it was up and running, it was self-

sustaining. The journals were coming, we didn‘t have to ask. It was just getting bigger

and bigger.

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The empowerment ethic, referred to above, is the connection between the OJS and global development. Open source software projects seem to work well in resource poor countries for two reasons: they are free (as in no cost), and they enable independence. The discourses surrounding open source and open access encourage users and developers to adopt these attitudes towards the developing world. As CU10 a software programmer from South Africa who was implementing OJS for a large African initiative explains:

In Canada there‘s internet everywhere, everyone has an online culture, whereas in Africa

it‘s a lot less of an online culture and the internet is a lot less common place. I mean

obviously I think it‘s getting better and I think in a few years time hopefully Africa will

be where everyone else is now, but people [in Africa] do need sort of a nudge in the right

direction, and help where they can get it, so that‘s a large role of what OJS and [our

organization] does.

This is why the goal of global development can be considered a characteristic of the DMORPs. It recalls John Willinsky‘s statements regarding the impetus behind the OJS which evolved following the decision to go open source with the OJS. As he describes:

Because I came out of that imperialism project [Learning to Divide the World], I felt that

there was something wrong that I could do something about. What‘s the state of things in

Africa? How are people beginning to use this technology [the Internet]? What are the

prospects? So that we can be more responsive rather than just saying here‘s our gift to

you, how come you‘re not using it, as it? That to me is just a carry over to the kind of

colonial attitude that I was trying to critique.

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Academic open source software projects-such as the OJS, are becoming involved in global development projects and by consequence involving universities in global development in new ways. The goals of these projects are to ―nudge‖ developing countries in the right directions in terms of their involvement in knowledge networks and information dissemination, ―empower‖ them, and through these activities attempt to move beyond the academic post-colonial condition by being ―responsive‖ to their situations. This is how global development becomes a significant part of the OJS user‘s story and might not be the case if the OJS was not a part of free and open culture. While the goal is for empowerment, and the OJS is most certainly contributing to reducing traditional publishing barriers, invaluably, all over the world, there is something slightly problematic in the language of the movement. I would argue that this language positions and objectifies ―the developing world‖, revealing, perhaps, another circuit of academic activity that needs to be decolonized.

7.2.3 OJS Journals take on “development”

While only a handful of users referred specifically to the ―developing world‖ or the cause of

―development‖ in their responses to the questionnaire, many of the journals associated with the users in this study described the goal of development as part of their ‗focus and scope‘. The

International Journal of Education and Development (IJED), as an example,

brings together research, action research and case studies in order to assist in the transfer

of best practice, the development of policy and the creation of theory. Thus, IJEDICT is

of interest to a wide-ranging audience of researchers, policy-makers, practitioners,

government officers and other professionals involved in education or development in

communities throughout the world.

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The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries (EJISDC) is also geared directly, as its title indicates, at developing countries as it:

strives to become the foremost international forum for practitioners, teachers, researchers

and policy makers to share their knowledge and experience in the design, development,

implementation, management and evaluation of information systems and technologies in

developing countries.

Interestingly, both of these journals are ‗born OJS journals‘ which I argue underscores the connection between the OJS and the goal of global development.

While several OJS journals overtly include ‗development‘ within their scopes, other journals include it in less overt ways employing different discursive mechanisms. Universitas Forum, whose banner logo features a smiling, dark skinned woman wearing a sun hat, is a journal that:

[O]ffers critical analysis of current approaches to international development cooperation

and practice-based research concerning global and local human development. It is

particularly interested in the role that international cooperation can play to foster such

processes and in experiences and approaches that are coherent with that aim. The journal

provides a forum for debate and the exchange of ideas and experiences among

practitioners, academics and policy shapers coming from different developmental,

cultural and institutional contexts.

Universitas Forum is published in four languages: English, Italian, French, and Spanish although papers are not translated into all languages (in other words, the journal content is not available in all of the languages). This journals displays an important characteristic that pertains to the

218 journals that are geared specifically towards the cause of development: the practical and experiential dimensions of research, writing and electronic publishing. The OJS seems to foster not only journals devoted to development, but rather journals geared towards to development and

‗praxis‘ (the tie between research and practice).

Other journals, while not dedicated necessarily to the production of relevant information for developing countries mentioned being geared towards development based on the primary element of being open access. As the International Journal of the Commons (IJC) focus and scope attests: ―the journal provides a platform for researchers and practitioners in developing and industrialized countries to come together, across disciplinary lines, and share knowledge of how common used and enjoyed resource are managed‖. Even OJS journals that do not directly refer to the goal of development, but have a global scope seem to be oriented towards development, particularly as they are placed within the context of the OJS community. The Journal of

Research Practice, as an example, is ―truly global initiative‖ which, among other things aims to:

Encourage reflection on the variety of contexts in which researchers find themselves.

Innovations developed by researchers to deal with the challenges of these contexts would

be studied. The journal should connect with the human conditions of our times, help

bridge multiple global divides, address institutional malfunctioning, explore the power of

connective (and cooperative) technologies, and advance lifelong learning.

An interpretive reading of the above description shows that the journal‘s goal is to connect researchers in a variety of contexts- many of which can be located in developing world contexts.

The sense of inclusion that this journal strives for can be interpreted as the attempt to include those who have been traditionally disenfranchised from research networks, particularly as

219 emphasis is placed on ―connective (and cooperative) technologies‖. This would mean, by extension researchers from developing countries. Other examples of the global scope of OJS journals include the Journal of Post-Colonial Text, which is a ―multi-disciplinary electronic journal presenting a global forum for both the critical discussion of postcolonial literature, culture, history, and theory, as well as postcolonial poetry and fiction‖, the International Journal of Design whose aim is to cover ―globalization and localization approaches to design‖, and

Transnational Curriculum Inquiry:

Which is constituted to support a worldwide (but not uniform) field of curriculum studies.

TCI is a site for scholarly conversations about curriculum work within and across

national and regional borders and welcomes contributions from anyone interested in

advancing curriculum studies as an academic and professional field of study.

Indeed, an overwhelming amount of OJS journals, including those whose members took part in this research study, as well as those who are part of the larger OJS community today (which has grown to 4000 journals), are globally oriented journals, and aim to address (or redress) traditional forms of academic exclusion. As a result, they publish content that tries to be relevant to a global community, and that they encourage submissions and contributions from all over the world. As a result, I argue that OJS journals represent one way in which universities are getting involved in global knowledge which is how they are involving universities within globalized knowledge production.

7.2.5 Towards the decolonization of DMORPs

In this chapter I begin by stating that OJS users are a diverse group. While this is true- they come from a variety of institutional contexts, and serve differing purposes within these contexts- it is

220 not the defining condition of OJS users since there is a meta-narrative that can be constructed around OJS users. A look at OJS users shows that academic open source software projects are different than other open source software projects. The OJS possesses a strong development core and a user community that while generally independent, has only been on the periphery of the software development process. OJS is not an open source software project wherein users are united by the development of software. Rather, users are united by the larger goal of the project advocating Open Access. Those that did not feel united by this goal were at the very least aware of it. Perhaps because of this goal, the OJS users managed to pull off the creation of their publications, despite the fact that many of them did so in a ‗rogue‘ fashion - without the consent, encouragement or knowledge, at least in the beginning of their involvement, from high level administrators within their organizations. And many seemed to hold a more experimental attitude towards their publications.

What is most interesting about this story of these OJS users is the perspective they have assumed in relation to the purpose of academic information. As users adopted and constructed a vision of

Open Access through their involvement in their projects, many of them connected it automatically to benefitting the ―developing world‖, and creating a more inclusive academic knowledge system. Thus the focus and scope of their journals often included the developing world, or at the very least, the notion of a global audience. This is why I argue that DMORPs, exemplified by the OJS, spread discourses and ideas, and contribute to the creation and re- creation of scholarly activities, ultimately creating new spaces of university interaction. At the same time, user (and journal) positions towards what they refer to as ―development‖ need to analyzed critically. How might their attitudes re-create and extend objectifying colonialist legacies, and how might these be subverted? Surely inclusion is a beginning, but the question is

221 whether it is enough. As Barndt (2009) reminds us, modern Western universities have a troubled colonial past. As Wilinsky‘s work shows us further, not only through the PKP project but also through his own scholarship, the act of decolonization is never over, but is a process that is continuous and even to some degree evasive. As university work ‗goes global‘ through such activities as DMORPs, we must think critically about how this occurs and be vigilant to work in favour of decolonization.

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Figure 9. Screenshot of the OJS journal New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Studies.

This journal represents an attempt to explore issues, ideas, and problems that lie at the intersection between the academic disciplines of social science and the body of thought and political practice that has constituted Marxism over the last 150 years. New Proposals is a journal of Marxism and interdisciplinary Inquiry that is dedicated to the radical transformation of the contemporary world order. We see our role as providing a platform for research, commentary, and debate of the highest scholarly quality that contributes to the struggle to create a more just and humane world, in which the systematic and continuous exploitation, oppression, and fratricidal struggles that characterize the contemporary sociopolitical order no longer exist.

From ―Mandate‖, New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Studies ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/newproposals.

Chapter 8: The Characteristics of Digitally Mediated Open Research Projects

The explosive growth of information technology based networks, which creates the backbone of digital academic space, is arguably one of the most transformative social phenomena of the current era. As I have shown, many social theorists have sought to understand the character, conditions and impact of digital networks by studying specific cases and constructing generalized meaning from these cases. Relating the work of Manuel Castells, the Spanish sociologist/media theorist who writes about the ―network society‖, to the context of higher education, Simon Marginson states:

Networking facilitates the small-scale units that remain central to innovation in higher

education, while securing their dependence on the network. Networking structures the

unstructured. At the same time that networking reduces the energy invested in the direct

exercise of command, it enables the coordination of individualized faculty work. It leads

to, in Castells' words, a "simultaneous concentration and decentralization of decision-

making" in which all the fine shadings of academic cultures, disciplinary differences, and

varying levels of professorial independence and managerial intervention can be readily

expressed. On one hand, there is a high level of continuity with the collegial past of

universities. On the other, institutions are transformed by fast communications and by the

more intense internal and external competitiveness this ability facilitates. (2004a, p. 4)

Marginson thus agrees with much of what Castells observes in his theory of the network society.

He believes that many of the trends that Castells articulates are also taking place in university

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224 contexts, and that networking operates in simultaneously contradictory ways within higher education institutions, extending traditions and remaking them. The question however, is not whether Marginson and Castells are right or wrong about the character of networking. Instead, their observations prompt further questions, namely ‗what‘ and ‗how‘. That is, despite the theorists‘ eloquence, it is still difficult to grasp, with precision, what exactly the effects of networks are on universities.

Open source software projects are examples of the type of networking that Castells describes, and Castells even brings them into some of his later analyses (2001b). Furthermore, open source software projects developed in academic environments exemplify some of the characteristics that

Marginson describes above. This study seeks to provide an example of what Marginson observes, grounding his observations while also analyzing their effects. At the same time, while

Marginson emphasizes the aspect of decentralized/re-centralized decision making that networking brings to bear on institutions of higher education, another way to frame the phenomenon is as a way of understanding how universities are present in what I refer to as digital academic, the space that is produced by the confluence of digital networks in academic settings. While networking takes place online, it is not simply the act of exchanging messages through time and space. It produces new spaces of communication in between agents that are created as communication proceeds. These spaces make up digital academic space. Academic open source software projects exemplify university activities online, beyond, for example, conventional discussions about e-learning, or enterprise resource management systems. While they do not represent by any means all of the online and Internet based activities in which universities engage, they are worthy of being researched as they provide a way of knowing more

225 about the characteristics, elements, identities and discourses that contribute to the constitution of digital academic space.

An important point often made about organizations, in this case universities, in relation to digitally mediated networks, is that they become involved in these networks in ways that are unique. The conditions of their involvement tend furthermore, to be constantly changing. It is for this reason that Marginson employs the word ‗dynamic‘ to describe the impact of networks on higher education. It is also the dynamism of involvement that makes them methodologically challenging to understand on the empirical level. This in turn affects the nature of discussions about universities and the Internet, which tend towards abstraction and generalizations. This factor guided two important decisions I made when conceiving this study: the first being the choice to study in depth one open source software project, the second being the decision to employ Clarke‘s method of situational analysis. These two decisions function in tandem: this is a study of the situation of one open source software development project. Studying the situation of one project allows me to capture the differences and of interesting issues which may not be repeated or present as a pattern, since the goal of analyzing the situation is not comparative, even though situations are constantly in flux. The method of situational analysis, furthermore, permits the serious inclusion and acceptance of theorizing the discourses (for instance who they are produced by and where they travel to) associated with the situation of the open source software project, and thinking about these theorizations as important goals of the research project.

Theorizing the discourses in turn facilitated analyses regarding the people and institutions involved in the situation, the rebuilding of their social worlds in relation to the larger questions under investigation. As Clarke explains: ―sites where individuals and discourses meet and identities and subjectivities are produced will continue to elaborate and increasingly be sites of

226 significance for qualitative research. ...‖ (p. 160). A fitting conclusion of this situational analysis, then, is an articulation of some of the important discourses that emerged from a situational analysis of the open source software project the OJS, and a presentation of the impact of these discourses within the field of higher education. This is because, according to Clarke: ―discourses are forms of knowledge that ―set conditions of possibility‖ (p. 160).

One important point that I make in the first two chapters of this study is the combining of two important fields to create a framework appropriate to capturing the intricacies and meanings of open source software development in academic settings. The combination of media studies concepts with concepts, theories and ideas from the field of higher education studies, had only been pursued previously in a few isolated instances. In this study grounded empirically many of the assertions that are located in the world of theory, particularly around issues of globalization and the networking. The combination of both fields required a new methodological approach.

Employing Clarke‘s methodology of situational analysis, which privileges discourse and accepts non-human elements into the research situation, provided a new way of undertaking research within higher education organizations, and in turn spoke to the needs of the study. Thus in chapters two and three, existing research gaps were identified through a review of the literature of about open source software and contemporary higher education, as well as important discursive constructions belonging to each social context. Chapter four describes and rationalizes the theoretical framework and methods employed in this thesis.

The conclusions that I have drawn from this study of the OJS I presented in three narratives that I constructed from my interviews and questionnaire responses. The first, chapter 5, dealt with the higher education context in which the OJS was developed and deployed, and provided an oral history of the software application framed by the discursive construction of the conditions of a

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‗successful open source software project‘. This chapter shows how strong leadership operates within an academic open source software project, demonstrating that while they tend be distributed world-wide there is also a strong functional core group who actively fostered the development of the OJS community. I also problematize the gender dynamics of this team, asking how they might exemplify the reproduction of traditional gender dynamics in digital academic space. I also argue that the higher education arena in which the software was developed, and out of which it emerged, did play an important in the project, operating less as a physical space and more as a set of principles and ideals. University values set the ―conditions of possibility‖ for the success of the PKP/OJS project. At the same time, as the university context operated as an ideal other ‗behind the scenes‘ elements rooted specifically to the context also provided the setting for the project‘s success, and helped it grow in an ‗of the radar‘ fashion.

These elements were prior existing relationships between members of the project, and prior experience with an open source software applications.

One compelling idea that came from the connection of open source software development and the higher education context that housed the software related to reputation and position.

According to the respondents- those who worked for the SFU library as well those who did not- the SFU was a more progressive, risk taking, and responsive organization as a result of their involvement with the OJS. In addition to the reputational benefits of being associated with the project- that is more people in further places knew about the SFU as the project grew, the project secured an existing identity for the SFU, proving (once again) that though digital academic space might seem like a new social space, it often serves existing social relations.

The second narrative, chapter 6, dealt with understanding more about the software developers involved in the project. The OJS software developers preferred flexible, contractual employment,

228 shared specific perspectives about the possibilities of the Internet, and their work on the

PKP/OJS project, and held strong identities and ideological commitments. Looking at the development of the PKP/OJS through the prism of the core members revealed a new type of professional identity within the university environment. This identity is important to recognize because of how it operates to encourage and spread discourses within the sphere of contemporary higher education, serving as liaisons of globalization. It was clear that the developers, who had the most direct contact with users, affected the direction of the project, as well as the perspectives of users, who often adopted the discourses and perspectives of the developers.

Indeed, this new and emerging identity might provide the most fertile ground for future research opportunities; as universities engage increasingly in digitally mediated activities more developers will be called upon to build applications. Consequently, the number of developers inhabiting universities will increase. Colouring in the details and analyzing the effects of this identity could be a valuable goal for future higher education research.

The third and last narrative in the analytical section of this thesis, in chapter 7, describes OJS users. What I found in my analysis of discussions with OJS users were some basic points about the technology skill-sets of OJS users – that some of them were, for example, able to customize and de-bug the application on their own, while some of them felt adrift in terms of adequate support either form the PKP team or from their institution. What was most interesting about this chapter, however, was exhibited in the way the users reflected on their involvement and use of the OJS as many of them engaged in similar ideological constructs as the PKP/OJS developers with regards to open access and open source software. This is true even for those who did not have very much experience with either movement, as well as for those who felt ambivalent about being part of the PKP community. This exploration of OJS users, albeit a very small sample of

229 users, thus revealed something about the spread of ideas and discourses through digital academic space; the example here is that both developers and users saw OJS use and support for open access and open source software as leading to greater equality – from ―information wants to be free‖ to ―helping developing world scholars‖ in the world for the benefit developing countries and their scholarship. This extends to the goals of the journals produced by users which embraced serving the scholarly needs in developing countries and stressed trans- and interdisciplinarity to serve these goals. The point made here is not to make a judgment about the value or sincerity of these goals, but rather to show how ideas travel and intermingle along the

OJS network. What I take from this is that the process of decolonization must continue even in digital academic space.

This brief summary of the analytical chapters of this situational analysis of the PKP/OJS highlights some of the interesting points that can be drawn out of this research project. It also demonstrates, more importantly, that there are myriad opportunities to learn about contemporary universities through studies that are Internet based. In this chapter, I put forth my theory of a generalized ‗ideal type‘ which I have named the digitally mediated open research project

(DMORP) as a way to frame future studies.

8.1.1 Digitally mediated open research projects

Canadian higher education, which is controlled provincially, has historically been known as a publicly funded system. Over the past few decades, provincial governments have offloaded some of the costs of higher education to students by raising the cost of tuition. While the cost of tuition is differentiated and varies from province to province and between degree programs, the overall trend shows higher costs to students which is a form of privatization. Privatization occurs in

230 other ways as well throughout the Canadian higher education system, such as through corporate sponsorships and technology transfers. Open access and academic open source software projects which are contributions to the public domain in this context are responses to the increasingly proprietary and privatized state of higher education. Within the publishing/knowledge production sector specifically, the move towards open access via information technology is a direct response to the increasing cost of subscription journals, and an indirect response to the rising cost of higher education. With this considered, Willinsky explains that the OJS represents a way to build upon the legacy of public universities in an era marked increasingly by privatization. In this way, one intention of the OJS project is to preserve a tradition that is to some degree being eroded through the use of information technology, and in this way the OJS is a new spin on an historical tradition. But as this research study of OJS shows, the effects of the development and dissemination of the OJS project go beyond simply Willinsky‘s initial intentions of having the university contribute to the public good through the production of knowledge.

8.1.2 Characteristics of DMORPs

Open source software initiatives that originate in and involve institutions of higher education are indications of a new sphere of activity in which universities are participating. This new sphere of activity, digital academic space, is contributing to the development of a new organizational form

(using that term loosely), that I am calling digitally mediated open research projects. The term denotes several of its characteristics which I describe in further detail below: a large component of these projects is that they are digital and networked, they are open in some way, they involve the dissemination of research – but are not pieces of research themselves, and they are projects- as opposed to institutes, departments or organizations. Because they are projects, they involve several disciplines, or members of several disciplines. DMORPs are online space-web sites or

231 web based applications that create web sites- that facilitate access to, and the organization and production of academic knowledge. What follows is a description of their characteristics using the OJS as a specific example.

1. DMORPs are ‗open‘- either open source or open access or a combination of both.

Because they are open, they are widely disseminated and cultivate collaboration within

the arena of higher education. Despite being globally disseminated, they are regionally or

locally customized. This means that to some degree, their purpose suits the local context.

Even though they are open, they are not necessarily completely decentralized, as in

Raymond‘s depiction of the bazaar metaphor. They are instead steered and designed by a

centralized group of developers who work in a contractual fashion on the project, and

through the intervention of this central group, are spread out far and wide-

decentralization is cultivated as opposed to spontaneous. It takes a fair degree of

advocacy and marketing on the part of the centralized group. Development and

dissemination of a DMORP is cast out, reigned in, and then cast out again through events

like the release of versions and academic conferences (both of which take place at the

home institution).

There are many examples of how the OJS, an example of a DMORP, has been used in

different ways according to the needs of the region. But one compelling example, as

Samuel Smith-Esseh a PKP/OJS researcher located at the University of British Columbia

describes, is where universities in Africa that have adopted the system publish ―campus

wide journals‖, because of a dearth of content (http://blogs.ubc.ca/pkp2009/tag/ajol/), as

opposed to journals with a disciplinary focus.

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At the same time, the introduction of the software, though regionally adaptable,

introduces new global imperatives into these regions. These imperatives include, as an

example, the creation of research and the cultivation of research opportunities to

contribute to the OJS network.

2. DMORPs contribute to a trans-disciplinary network of academics linked as a community

of software users. OJS users, for example, do not feel as though they belong to a

knowledge network based around their subject of expertise, despite the fact that they have

more exposure to experts in their field via their journals. Some OJS users felt a sense of

community with other OJS users even though users were located within other disciplines.

Many of the journals were actually inter and trans-disciplinary journals. This is

interesting compared to the often ―tribal‖ (Becher & Trowler, 2001) nature of discipline

based academic communities. The PKP conferences of 2007 and 2009 cultivated these

trans-disciplinary networks by providing users with the opportunities to reflect on their

use of the OJS, and present their reflections and experiences publicly at the conference

and on the PKP post-conference blog, thus creating, in a sense of new knowledge

opportunity for OJS academics.

3. DMORPs are rogue projects. They begin off the radar of official university channels,

though with their increasing use might be adopted as part of the official university policy.

The OJS began as an experiment which was a part of Dr. John Willinsky‘s own research

interests in post-colonialism and use of new technologies to create new literacies. The

project employed students initially as developers, and then as it grew was taken over by

more official channels in the SFU library. The OJS however, was never employed in any

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strategic or official way by either the central SFU or UBC, and remains to a great degree

grassroots.

4. DMORPs serve ―global development‖. Contributions to what is often referred to as

global development have become an important aspect of IT based projects that are ‗open‘

because they are low cost and adaptable, and provide users and developers, often located

in institutions of higher education with a way to be involved in the production of

knowledge. The OJS has become involved in global development as members of the

project market and implement the software in geographic regions where publishing

facilities were previously non-existent. This helps to produce more academic knowledge

used in a development context. Furthermore, many of OJS journals involve development.

Public universities have historically included the notion of ‗service‘ to their official

missions, which often entailed their engagement with the wider community. DMORPs

provide a new way to fulfill the service missions of universities as they become involved

in global development. At the same time, as this occurs, new concepts and linguistic

mechanisms need to be put in place to ensure that this occurs in truly just and equitable

manner, stripping away possibilities for the further objectification of the global south

through these activities.

5. DMORPs introduce and recreate professional identities within universities. An example

of a re-created identity is the OJS developer, who held very strong principles about his

work. He is usually male. He is a believer in free information, flexible employment, anti-

corporatism, and the superiority of open source software development. The core OJS

programmer is neither an administrator/manager/bureaucrat, nor a student, nor a

professor. He is allied with the librarians and information technology specialists. His

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work on the academic cyber-project allows him to travel, and he spreads the gospels of

his project which are the discourses of open information. His own identity and

motivations grow and transform as the project grows. This identity, a version of the

traditional male academic, becomes a powerful agent in the dissemination of discourses

as he comes into contact with other users of the application.

Another example is the librarian, who has been over the course of time, female. In the

DMORP, the librarian who can be either male or female, becomes more of an

information technology specialist, who also adopts the discourse of openness, and might

even be involved in spreading it, and by extension becomes interested in the cause of

global development through proximity to the core developers.

Even the professors‘ subjectivity is remade, or at the very least affected as they become

involved in academic cyber-projects. Professors, who are often cast as luddites, become

appreciative of and involved in the cultivation of an online presence, and are perhaps

more open to the methodologies and practices of other disciplines.

The DMORP is an abstracted concept based on a situational analysis of the OJS. It is the result of an analysis of the social worlds and arenas of academic open source software, of the OJS, of

OJS users, developers, and journals, and of the institutions that employ the software. As Clarke explains: ―a good interpretive analysis of the situation of inquiry ideally produces new working sensitizing concepts or elaborates and refines old ones, integrates theoretical advances with grounded empirical work, and is explicitly located, situated and historicized. It should also be useful in the world in some ways, capable of demonstrating its pragmatist roots‖ (p. 293). Here I must emphasize that the above described form is a fictional and dynamic concept. It would be difficult to posit, for example, that all DMORPs adhere to all five conditions outlined above if

235 they conform to any of the criteria at all. Instead, the concept is akin to an ‗ideal type‘, as defined by the German Sociologist Max Weber, whose theories have a strong legacy within the field of higher education. Weber created the theory of the ‗ideal type‘ as an epistemological tool to mediate between actual phenomena and their representations. Interested in the reconstruction of historical events through language, particularly in the political/economic arena, as Burger explains, Weber‘s ideal types do not refer to something that is ideal in the good, perfect, or moral sense of the word, but rather as ideal in the imaginary sense of the word (Burger, 1976). For

Weber the purpose of the ideal type is to create a fictional classification scheme that lives in the world of ideas, to compare to phenomena that are located in the real world, and to investigate similarities between the ideal type and the real phenomenon. In this case, the OJS itself is not the ideal type, but is rather the inspiration for the creation of an ideal type. By invoking Weber here my intention is to make clear that the DMORP is a conceptual tool that I may call upon to conduct further research, and to create a new convention for discussing the impact of information technology on universities. While it too is abstracted to some degree, as are so many discussions about information technology in the university, a problem noted above in Marginson‘s observations, the DMORP is an abstraction that is based on a tangible situation.

8.1.3 The impact of DMORPs on higher education

DMORPs in digital academic space now play a significant role within the context of higher education. As networked information technology projects, DMORPS are agents of globalization, and contribute overall to the globalization of higher education in ways that are different from the official channels of global higher education – work associated with, for example the

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Bank or even global agents such as the General Agreement on Trades and Services (Robertson, Bonal, & Dale,

236

2002). This is because DMORPs, which revolve around the creation of web sites aimed at organizing and distributing academic knowledge, create a network involving institutions all over the world, as in the case of the OJS which, according to PKP core developers, now produces over

5000 journals. Not only are academics involved in this network, but so are their institutions.

Thus the SFU Library becomes implicated in a global situation, and becomes ‗globalized‘.

Members are not only united through cyber-communication, but also through embodied experiences that are reciprocal: developers travel to institutions to discuss the project‘s software and capabilities, members are invited to the university that houses the system to present on their experiences with the software. This reciprocity is cultivated by those steering the DMORP.

DMORPs possess interesting dynamics in terms of how they are complicit in spreading discourses. In the case of the OJS, both users and developers partook in placing faith in the value of open source and open access, wanting on the whole to build up and become more involved in the Open Access movement. Presumably, this discourse which was so effective and pertinent to the adoption and dissemination of the project, originated with Willinsky, spread to the OJS developers, who in turn spread it both to core users and regular users. OJS users enthusiastically adopted the cause of Open Access and a belief in the superiority of open source software processes, and engaged in the same discursive constructions about the Internet and cyberspace as the developers. Therefore these projects can work to spread certain discourses, and it is necessary to see the directions in which they travel and to theorize the power dynamics behind these travels.

OJS developers, prime agents in the dissemination of discourses, began to adopt this discourse of

―global development‖ as they became more involved in the dissemination of the project, and as it became more widely used in developing regions such as Africa and various parts of

237 development. As this occurred, the goal of freeing information to contribute to development through opening access to existing knowledge and providing opportunities to distribute indigenous knowledges, became more important, whereas it may not have been a part of their language prior to this growth. This course I see as impacting the type of knowledge produced in

OJS journals which was very often inter/trans-disciplinary and development oriented, or at the very least, could be transferred and utilized in a development situation. Of course, it is very difficult to establish with certainty whether journal foci were impacted directly in this fashion, but there is a suggestive overall trend based on a review of existing OJS journals.

8.1.4 Focus on power dynamics

Understanding the power dynamics at play within the situation of the OJS project, and more generally in DMORPs, is elusive. The entire movement to open up access in digital academic space is dedicated at its very core to the breaking down of traditional boundaries, and towards building up opportunities and spaces for those that have over the course of the history of academic knowledge production been excluded from the network, in a systemic fashion. Many of the participants in the OJS project have substantial experience in the realm of post-colonial theory and activism, the project founder Willinsky included, and use their experiences to guide the direction of the project. Clarke herself raises an interesting point about the goal of research when she discusses ways of analyzing visual discourses. She, along with many other researchers, argues there are at least two distinct forms of research. There is critical research, which aims to equalize unequal social relations; and there is empirical research which aims to initially present these unequal situations. As she explains further: ―... these two paradigms have been held apart too long‖ (p.209). Thus, in the situation of the OJS, unequal power relations could be interpreted in the positions of OJS core project members, particularly developers, over the users.

238

Furthermore, the SFU, even though it is perceived as the smaller underdog university within its region, garnered a fair amount of social capital through the project. OJS journals, according to some users were laid out visually in a North American manner, because of the fact that they are created using a content management system, and those journals that are oriented explicitly towards the goal of development, often employ visual representations, dark skinned smiling female farmers for example, that though compelling, seem to speak to a colonialist legacy. These are reminders that no matter how sensitive the post-colonial ethic of a project, decolonization is a never ending process, particularly in such a highly discursive and symbolic medium. With this research study, I hope to open up new avenues to decolonize the efforts of DMORPs.

8.1.5 Open source software development in higher education contexts

This research project originally began as a study into academic open source software with the goal of understanding how higher education environments affect the development of open source applications, and vice versa. While the main argument moves away from a focus on open source software development to sketch out a new academic ‗ideal type‘, it is still possible to reach some conclusions about the open source software development process specifically. Thus, in answer to the question ―how does the open source software process function within the higher education context?‖ it is fair to state the following:

1. Open source software is embraced enthusiastically not only in universities but also in

colleges and institutes, as collaborative initiatives.

2. The success of the open source model as applied to the higher education context

seems to be the ability to work in a decentralized and flexible fashion, without losing

total control of the software.

239

3. In the case of the OJS, an organized infrastructure was in place to manage a

decentralized project, and the larger institutional context of the SFU library had

experience working with open source software applications.

4. The willingness of the members of the SFU library was informed by this previous

experience which in turn was connected to an existing social structure based on

individuals within the SFU who had worked together previously.

5. The larger academic goal of the OJS application contributed to the successful

functioning of the open source model, which related to the project‘s ability to raise

funding via grants and awards as well as to create strategic partnership for the re-

development of the software. Raymond‘s bazaar metaphor is applicable only to some

degree in the case of the OJS. It would not be accurate to say that the OJS

development occurred in the ‗bazaar‘ manner, but rather in a

centralized/decentralized manner.

6. Last of all, members of the OJS remarked upon how is was not only the higher

education context that cultivated open source, but that the open source project

rewarded the university context by contributing positively to their reputation and

providing them opportunities for meaningful digitally mediated involvement.

8.2 There must be more to this digital story

The methodology of situational analysis employed in this project is but one of the possible methods that can be used to further investigate open source projects and academic cyber- projects. There are myriad ways of going about looking at these phenomena, including case study methods, comparative methods, and larger scale macro-scopic methods, involving several different specific projects. Employing all of these different ways of knowing would ultimately

240 answer some of the many questions that have been born as a result of this small scale project.

Thus there is room for much more research in this area. What this project shows, however, is that studying and theorizing open source software projects is a valuable way to understand universities as digital academic space proliferates.

The purpose of construction the DMORP ideal-type is to provide a vehicle for studying more academic web-based projects. The goal is to be reflexive about the involvement of the academic institutions in digitally mediated web-based projects in an empirical fashion. As I have shown, these projects and the attendant spaces that they create are potent in the way that they are transforming and redefining the arena of higher education. As scholars of higher education, we need to ensure that they are not overlooked, and that they continue to proliferate in a manner that is both responsible and effective. This research study is a first step towards taking action on how universities are inhabiting digital academic space but there are, as my study also shows, many more steps that need to be taken.

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