the most fastidious connoisseur of the present artifacts of civilization.

The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.

facsimile transmission

punched-card machine long ago produced by Hollorith for the purposes of the census

physicists promptly constructed thermionic-tube equipment

produces in a short time a list of all employees who live in Trenton and know Spanish

The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience

For mature thought there is no mechanical substitute

Britannica

enabling openness is therefore itself socially beneficial

“it will be reviewed by the Administration and we will issue a response.”

idea of open science dates back to the very origin of modern science,

The Public Library of Science (PLOS), for example, has a policy that requires authors “to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction,” with refusal to do so being grounds for rejection of a manuscript (PLOS, n.d.a). Importantly, PLOS positions this Data Availability policy as being a natural extension of OA publishing.

not only must it be online, but it must be public, it cannot be behind a paywall or login or have other barriers to use.

Openness creates a virtuous cycle

“phraseological neologisms

In other words, “open” is being used here not to indicate the resource itself, but rather to indicate the nature of the tools used to build the resource, or by which resources are provided.

Jenkins, et al. (2009) argue that much of what we consider received culture is the product of appropriation and remixing, from the Iliad to Lewis Carroll

“open skies” policy enables a nation to allow other nations’ commercial aviation to fly through its airspace — though, importantly, without giving up control of its airspace.

Creative Commons has very effectively lowered the bar to participation in the open source community

But chief among these is the fact that there is a finite number of developers in the world with the skillset to contribute to such projects. Open source may mean the freedom to change the software, but this is only true in theory; in practice, the bar to participating in the open source community is high, as one needs a high level of programming skill to meaningfully contribute.

Open source democracy

information about what the government is doing is meaningless without the ability for citizens to then act on that information to exert influence on the government. This, of course, is almost a definition of participatory democracy.

aking his cue from Popper, George Soros in 1993 founded the Open Society Institute

As the OU’s mission statement makes clear, the underlying philosophy of open education equates access to educational opportunity with social justice.

Education, however, is not just about artifacts, not just about access to books and articles, not just about reuse of lesson plans. Education is also about advising and support, the sorts of services that are used at some point by every student affiliated with an institution of higher education. First generation college students, in particular, have a need for these kinds of support services, as they might not have access to that expertise elsewhere in their lives; use of these services at an institution dramatically increases first-generation and at-risk students’ graduation rates (

ense that the courses offered are accessible to all

This is perhaps the purest form of open education, in which the instructor is a facilitator, and the students collaborate to create a shared understanding

makes it clear that if a work is open, then any and all of the things that it may be possible to do with it are allowed, unless explicitly disallowed.

legal scholar Lessig documents the expansion of copyright under U.S. law over the past 40 years. Lessig (2005b) argues that this expansion, far from promoting “the Progress of Science and useful Arts” (as specified in the U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8), actively inhibits it

Suber suggests that OA removes two types of barriers: price and permission. This is an important point, because these are far from the only barriers to access. Suber lists four types of barriers that may remain in place even if price and permission barriers have been removed: censorship, language, handicap access, and connectivity [2]. Open Access does not directly address any of these barriers. However, having resources available online for free (gratis) is certainly closer to the ideal of universal access than not. Open does not mean friction-free, it just means with as little friction as possible.

Open Source Hardware

here are four rights articulated by Creative Commons licenses: Attribution: All distributions of a work, and derivative works based upon it, must be credited to the creator of the work. Non-commercial: Derivative work cannot be for commercial use. Share-alike: Derivative work must be licensed under terms identical to those of the original work. No Derivatives: A work may be redistributed, but only “unchanged and in whole;” no derivative works may be made based on it.

“free as in beer.”

Riffing on Stallman’s quote, some suggest that there is a third “free”: free as in puppies. This amusingly captures both the price meaning of free, as well as implying the costs of ongoing maintenance for the liberty meaning of free.

so you can help your neighbor.

. The interpretation of the word “open” to mean a shared resource to which all had access, fit neatly into the philosophy of the modern library movement of the nineteenth century. The phrases “open shelves” and “open stacks” emerged at this time, referring to resources that were directly available to library users, without necessarily requiring intervention by a librarian.

Opening the door on open

the interface to Microsoft Word contains few deep principles about writing, and as a result it is possible to master Word's interface without becoming a passable writer. This isn't so much a criticism of Word, as it is a reflection of the fact that we have relatively few really strong and precise ideas about how to write well.

Experts often possess many such minimal canonical examples, together with heuristics they can use to reason rapidly about the examples. Those heuristics are often quick-fire rules of thumb, full of exceptions and special clauses, not rigorous proof techniques. They let experts sketch out arguments, and figure out what is likely true, and what is likely false. In short, they're a powerful way of exploring and obtaining insight.