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Chitu Okoli chitu.okoli.org

Posted on Jul 9, 2013 in Research publications

Beyond Open Source Software: A Framework, Implications, and Directions for Researching Open Content

Okoli, Chitu and Carillo, Kevin Daniel André, Beyond Open Source Software: A Framework, Implications, and Directions for Researching Open Content (July 5, 2013). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1954869 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1954869

The same open source philosophy that has been traditionally applied to software development can be applied to the collaborative creation of non-software information products, such as books, music and video. Such products are generically referred to as open content. Due largely to the success of large projects such as Wikipedia and the Creative Commons, open content has gained increasing attention not only in the popular media, but also in scholarly research. It is important to rigorously investigate the workings of the open source process in these new media of expression. This paper introduces the scope of emerging research on the open content phenomenon, other than open source software. We develop a framework for categorizing copyrightable works as utilitarian, factual, aesthetic or opinioned works. Based on these categories, we consider the applicability of some implications of findings from open source software research for open content. We review some key theory-driven findings from open source software research and assess the applicability of extending their implications to open content. We present a research agenda that integrates the findings and proposes a list of research topics that can help lay a solid foundation for open content research. We also briefly review the literature for some specific directions of open content research, involving the quality of products, the marketing of digital music, and open content in developing countries.

A shorter version of this paper was published in conference proceedings: Okoli, Chitu and Kevin Carillo (2013). Beyond open source software: framework and implications for open content research. Proceedings of the 21st European Conference for Information Systems. Utrecht, Netherlands. June 5-8, 2013.

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