First Monday

This paper reports findings from an exploratory study about how students majoring in humanities and social sciences use the Internet and library resources for research. Using student discussion groups, content analysis, and a student survey, our results suggest students may not be as reliant on public Internet sites as previous research has reported. Instead, students in our study used a hybrid approach for conducting course–related research. A majority of students leveraged both online and offline sources to overcome challenges with finding, selecting, and evaluating resources and gauging professors’ expectations for quality research.

The Google Books Project has drawn a great deal of attention, offering the prospect of the library of the future and rendering many other library and digitizing projects apparently superfluous. To grasp the value of Google’s endeavor, we need among other things, to assess its quality. On such a vast and undocumented project, the task is challenging. In this essay, I attempt an initial assessment in two steps. First, I argue that most quality assurance on the Web is provided either through innovation or through “inheritance.” In the later case, Web sites rely heavily on institutional authority and quality assurance techniques that antedate the Web, assuming that they will carry across unproblematically into the digital world. I suggest that quality assurance in the Google’s Book Search and Google Books Library Project primarily comes through inheritance, drawing on the reputation of the libraries, and before them publishers involved. Then I chose one book to sample the Google’s Project, Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.

While “open” normally has connotations of public goods, the idea of “open”–ness has been used for decades as a competitive strategy by firms in the computers and communications industries. Phrases like “open standard,” “open source” and more recently “open innovation” have been used to refer to these strategies.

What do they have in common? Which ones really are “open”? What does “open” mean, anyway?

The author discusses the issues faced in the creation and adoption of cyberinfrastructure, contrasting firm strategies for three types of “open”–ness in the context of their respective business models.

Cyberinfrastructure (CI) projects offer great opportunities for U.S. higher education, but also pose significant, long–term sustainability challenges. This paper suggests four general strategies for overcoming those challenges, and poses a range of questions that CI proponents should consider, in the interests of generating CI that can support global academic leadership while remaining sustainable even after NSF funding completes.

In the technical world, ‘design’ implies having a set of specifications to which the resulting design responds. This, in turn, implies that you know what it is that you are designing — i.e. that you can describe or define it. The current state of understanding of cyberinfrastructure calls into question both of these assertions. This brief paper will suggest some important considerations.

This article presents a survey of responses to patent thickets. The first group involves efforts to either keep questionable patents from ever issuing or removing them from patent space after they have issued — in particular, the “Peer–to–Patent” project, also known as “Community Patent Review.” Proposed by Professor Beth Noveck (2006) and subsequently incorporated into a pilot project by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), Peer–to–Patent will use distributed online communities to assist in the review of patents for questions of novelty and obviousness and by enabling a virtual community of practice in a field to suggest prior art to the patent examiner. Its success will depend on the ability to leverage developments in cyberinfrastructure in the areas of Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) and information retrieval. This article also suggests extending Peer–to–Patent into the realm of patent reexamination and post–grant opposition, which are mechanisms that can remove invalid patents once they have been issued.

Tougher examination of patent applications reduces anti–commons effects while reducing the frequency and costs of litigation. Modelled after open source/free software collaborations, the “Peer to Patent” initiative seeks to improve the quality of patents by developing a Web–based infrastructure whereby volunteer experts external to the PTO’s review applications, assemble prior art information, and submit the results of their collective work back to the Patent Office examiner. This paper endorses the spirit and goals of the “Peer to Patent” initiative, but questions its reliance on the open source model. A discussion of the functions of peer review, the meaning of peer, and the motivations of the reviewers in different contexts indicates that editorial peer review — not open source — can provide a more effective model for integrating peer review of patent applications into PTO practices.

The authors provide evidence that software patents have more severe boundary problems and generate greater litigation costs than most other patents. Software patents tend to perform badly because the associated property rights are often expressed quite abstractly. The problem of mapping words to technology is difficult for any kind of technology, but it is especially difficult for software inventions because of the abstract nature of the technology. The problem has been made worse because when the courts have considered software inventions they have relaxed patent law doctrines that work to limit abstraction in other areas of technology. As a result, patent–based property rights to software inventions are not tethered to a specific device or to a specific physical or chemical process. Ironically, verbal descriptions corresponding to precise mathematical representations may be ambiguous; this is because of the inherent abstraction of the mathematical representations.

The author describes in this paper the creation and operation of the Open Science Grid (OSG [1]), a distributed shared cyberinfrastructure driven by the milestones of a diverse group of research communities. The effort is fundamentally collaborative, with domain scientists, computer scientists and technology specialists and providers from more than 70 U.S. universities, national laboratories and organizations providing resources, tools and expertise. The evolving OSG facility provides computing and storage resources for particle and nuclear physics, gravitational wave experiments, digital astronomy, molecular genomics, nanoscience and applied mathematics.

In making this argument, the article demystifies metadata by defining and categorizing types of standards, provides a brief historical overview of the rise of descriptive standards in museums, libraries and archives, and considers the current tensions and ambitions in making descriptive practice more economic [1].