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Open Source Methods Useful Way Beyond Software
Tom Steinberg writes "Former head of policy at the British Prime Minister's office, Geoff Mulgan, has co-authored a paper on uses of Open Source methods in arenas far beyond the normal Sourceforge universe. The paper is jointly written with Tom Steinberg, head of UK civic hacking fraternity mySociety and explores the use of open source methods to improve academic peer review, drafting of legislation and even media regulation."
One problem with an Open Source approach to modifying academic papers, is that the original author has a strong interest in maintaining sole authorship : for better or worse, their future appointments pretty much depend on publication history.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
a lot like open source. And has been so for quite some time. I publish my results, stating what I have been doing and precisely how. If I can as many other people as possible to use my results and ideas, I will gain respect in the scientific community (a lot of references). Regarding the publication process, open archives such as arxiv have been gaining in popularity for a long time, see e.g. http://arxiv.org/show_monthly_submissions