I was glad to find Clancy's post on Kairosnews pointing to AKMA's Random Thoughts highlight of a discussion going on about "open scholarship." For example, the taxonomy of "openness":

One of the topics involves the question of what the various conversants mean by “open,” which I’d summarize with the following list of opennesses:

1. “open source” (Stephen Carlson’ emphasis): primary texts freely available online.
2. “open access”: Scholarship should be available to the reading public apart from the impedimenta of high prices and libraries or bookstores in remote locations.
3. “open entry” (Paul’s emphasis): Scholarship should take place on the basis of interest and capacity, without according privileged standing to those with Ph.D.s in specialized fields, or academic appointments. Anyone may join in.
4. “open data” Scholarship should be archived in open, easily-indexable data formats.
5. “open discourse”: Scholarship should conduct its business in public, where interested parties (who aren’t necessarily aiming to participate) can watch. learn, and pose interesting “outsider” challenges.

The taxonomy is useful, but I'm concerned about the use of "freely available online" in describing open source. Is this "free" in the copyleft sense? One might hope so, for Stephen Carlson of Hypotyposeis points in the larger discussion to the FSF's role in the genesis of open source:

The "Open Source" movement started in the arena of computer programming, with the Free Software Foundation types reacting against the increasing use of copyright law to limit access and use of source code that others have developed. Although some of them have come up ingenious ways of using copyright to force people to share and share alike, the basic intent has always been to have computer source code be freely available for use by any interested person.

But on the other hand, Carlson goes on to suggest that open source scholarship only applies to primary texts (as suggested in AKMA's definition above). And even the Disseminary, as Clancy has noted, was not allowing derivative works with their CC license (something AKMA has promised to address).

So what I think is missing in all of this is, like above, the definition of the term "free." To me, open source is not always "free" in the way that Stallman defines free software, but it certainly is much more "free" in terms of Taran Rampersad 's intellectual usability. And "open source scholarship," if taken from the ideological perspective on open source, should apply to all scholarly product, not just primary texts. That is, if we want to have a free culture. So let's define open source scholarship along the same lines as the Open Source Initiative, those who invented the term (and, I might add, own the trademark). Anyone must be granted the right to copy, modify, and redistribute the text without the need for asking permission. Then, as these discussions are doing, look at how this may change the way that scholarship is or can be conducted, but always keeping in mind that open source has a clear meaning that is based in principle.

Meanwhile, and I feel like I'm being the open source advocate nitpick of what is a good discussion; I really like what I'm reading in terms of how the scholars in this discussion are working through concerns about publishing and peer review as it relates to openness. But Paul Nikkel's post on deinde troubles me as well when he writes about how to handle peer review,

Having said that the programming analogy is too attractive so I'm going to continue using it in proposing a solution. A solution may be simple co-existance of the same kind we see in the Linux variations; commercial, peer reviewed, end product packages built upon an open source code.

There's an assumption here that Linux is somehow largely refined to what it is by the distributions, which ignores the peer review process that goes on in open source communities. Plans for new features and revision and generation of new code goes through a review process, often with debate--something that typically does not happen in scholarly reviews since there's no dialogue--before being accepted into the product. While certainly the commercial entities who pay programmers to work on the code are having some influence, it's the project management of the community and the way that changes flow into the product which determines the quality. So let's not assume that commercialization is the secret to quality control. Commercialization of scholarly work, and it's concern about ownership, is largely responsible for the current scholarly publishing crisis.