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Open publishing is a new media process of creating news and other content for publication primarily on the Internet. Open publishing allows anybody to publish and access information. This form of publication supports participation, collaboration and do-it-yourself content creation and it promotes equal distribution and access to knowledge. Open publishing is commonly associated with the production of information and news that is transparent to readers. Transparency of news implies openness and accountability and that it is open to discussion and editorial changes by the creators and users, hence the term open publishing. The production of news through the open publishing process is also an interactive and participatory process. This participatory process includes creating, editing and commenting on news and other content. This allows users to become producers, otherwise known as produsers, of media and news. The open publishing model is primarily non-proprietary and non-hierarchical in structure. It nurtures the expression of viewpoints that differ to that of the mainstream. News and information that can be published openly diminishes the hierarchical structure of news media by lessening editorial processes as well as by making any editorial processes open for viewing.
In many respects the open publishing movement began with the development and growth of the World Wide Web. However, even before access to electronic media became widespread, a series of open source projects were established between 1960 and 1990. The first, Request for Comments (RFC), was established by Steve Crocker on April 7, 1969 which offered records of the Internet design documents. They often include very detailed technical information.
The RFC's started as a record for a record of the Network Working Group's design of the ARPANET. In the end, they turned out to provide a convenient, useful for documentation and distribution of the research performed by the developers of the Internet. They are regarded as the internet official design despite of their names are "Request For Comments".
During this period, The USENET (1979) was developed by four students, Tom Truscott, Jim Ellis, Steve Bellovin, and Steve Daniel from the University of North Carolina. USENET allows people to post articles that are organized into topical categories called newsgroups. Other people who are subscribed to the same newsgroups are then able to read the articles and reply to them. It is a one-to-many communication mean, not like email which is one to one communicarion mean. The technology that USENET uses is UUCP that connects to other servers over diap-up modems. This simplicity and openness of USENET led to the explosion of its usage in the early 80's (Hauben, 1998).
After the development of the Internet, the 1990s saw the establishment of open and peer-reviewed journals such as the Electronic Journal of Communication (EJC) and Postmodern Culture (Suber, 2005). The first free, online scientific archive, ArXiv, was established in 1991 by Paul Ginsparg and was the first of many archiving projects (Morgan, 2005).
Another major development in open publishing during the 1990s was the release of free online textbooks. The result of this movement was the establishment of the Online Books Page, founded by John Mark Ockerbloom in 1993, and the free full-print textbooks made available by the National Academies Press in 1994. The 21st century has seen the rapid growth of online and free academic journals such as the Wayback Magazine established in 2001; online archives such as the Collection of Open Digital Archives established in 2000; and online encyclopedias such as the Wikipedia founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales. There has been a recent surge of open source news reporting with projects such as Indymedia, founded in Seattle in 1999, and the Guerilla News, founded in New York in 2000. Both are growing in support and becoming increasingly global (Suber, 2005).
There are numerous theoretical accounts and perspectives of the open publishing process. One of these perspectives is its ability to encourage the production and distribution of transparent news. Some organisations that utilise the open publishing model, such as Indymedia, have been described as implementing what is termed Radical transparency. It is a management method where a majority of decision making is carried out publicly. The news and information that is produced by organisations through the open publishing process is considered to be radically transparent as obvious biases remain and the information is primarily unedited while any editing process is carried out publicly. Non-government organisations like Indymedia have employed new media technologies and the open publishing model to create radical transparency in which no contentious news will go without publicity (Clifford, 2002). Radical transparency is also considered to encourage authors, who use the open publishing model, to deliver news and information that is of a better quality as there is little or no editing; it is openly published.
The open publishing process has been criticised for allowing the publication of low quality and inaccurate information. This criticism has been responded to in the ‘eyeball theory’. This theory was first applied to the open source movement by Eric Raymond who claimed that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow�? (Raymond, 2000). This statement is termed Linus’s law. This theory has been applied to the open publishing movement in Arnison’s law which states that “given enough eyeballs, problematic content is shallow�? (Arnison, 2001). What this means is that if a large audience of peers, readers and commentators view the news and information then almost all problematic content will be highlighted and fixed.
Open publishing is a process that primarily occurs through the Internet. As it exists within a digital environment it allows more people to participate. Many organisations, such as Indymedia, Kuro5hin and OhMyNews, allow ordinary citizens to become journalists. This frequently theorised process is often termed do-it-yourself culture, or more specifically DIY journalism. Through the open publishing process everyday citizens are becoming what are termed as ‘produsers’. 'Produsers' are users, as they are highly engaged with the content, as well as producers, as they produce and generate new content (Bruns, 2004). The concepts of 'produsers' and DIY culture are key elements to the open publishing process.
The open publishing movement has not fallen short of criticism. The lack of objectivity within open publishing sources such as Indymedia and Slashdot is said to limit the sites' credibility as reliable news publications (Kitaeff, 2005; Beckerman, 2003). Also, many readers are deterred from the inaccurate or offensive postings (Kitaeff, 2005). For example, in slashdot, the symbol of topics about microsoft is a picture of Bill Gates as a borg (half machine and half human creature in startrek movie), due to its community's tendency against microsoft dominations in IT industry. This minor example indicates that their subjectivity effects how they see the world around them and makes non objective news coverage or inaccurate comments inevitable. Moreover, comments in slashdot are often quite offensive.
The effectiveness of open publishing news sources as democratic media has also been questioned. According to Beckerman (2003), it is unclear whether open publishers will prosper or weaken as they teeter on the edge of democracy and anarchy as the society grows. In other word, the bigger open publishing society has become, the harder it is to guarantee the accuracy and credibility of most news they publish. With no stringent editorial process, and limited resources, it can be argued that the World Wide Web will soon become so infiltrated with citizen journalists that it will be difficult to discern what is credible and what is inaccurate (Beckerman, 2003). For instance, there are a lot of blogs that actully are diaries for extrovert people who want other to know how they feel and what they experience everyday. Those blogs are almost impossible to be regarded as accurate news source. On the other hand, there are blogs that are dedicated to publish stories that the big media companies are not interested because the stories are too small or not aligned with their interest. An example is Robert Scoble's blog that provides inside stories from microsoft corporation, which we can not get from the common media.
Such criticisms also apply to peer review and academic open publishing. Quality control is said to be minimized due to less peer review information and an increased volume of citizen journalism and citizen reporting. It is said that peer review is of prime importance to scholarly publishing and the academic reward system that determines who perishes and who survives. Further, as information is more easily and freely accessible online, journal prices have been seen to increase by some of the commercial publishers, which has posed serious financial problems for libraries and universities (Cronin, 2001; Emmott, 2004).
Another potential problem raised in regards to do-it-yourself media is the shelf-life of the movement itself. Hundreds of zines and local access television shows are being terminated and many web sites are not updated regularly as their founders overwork or find new jobs. The question is how long will people continue to maintain these sites in order for this movement to continue? (Cox, 2002).
The most prominent application of open publishing is online journalism. The open publishing movement has provided people with an alternative method of news production and news distribution. According to Arnison (2001), open publishing has developed in response to the privatisation of information by multimedia conglomerates such as CNN or BBC. Therefore, all information and news that come from them must obey ecomomic laws, i.e. must sell and not offending the authority. For instance, the news coverage in Iraq war is controlled by the military to keep the good image of the war to the American citizens to get their support.
As the response to that situation, open publishing sites emerged. Sites such as Kuro5hin, OhMyNews and Indymedia allow users to access news articles free of charge. Open publishing theoretically allows everyone to become a content producer. Thus, in contrast to the news created by private media companies, the content featured on open publishing news sites is written, researched and posted by the users. They can be anyone from taxi driver, teacher, professional journalist, or even senator, because in internet no one knows you're a dog. The quality of the news depends only on its content, regardless of the writer.
The open publishing model of news distribution is heralded as democratic media (Beckerman, 2003) as there is no traditional editorial process. Kuro5hin and Slashdot have ranking systems for readers to rate articles, ensuring the quality of the articles displayed on the front page are of a high standard and suitable for the audience. Open publishing provides for articles to be commented on and discussed by the readers in a public forum. This allows for a two-way communication between readers and writers, which is not available in traditional news delivery.
Open publishing news distribution is a significant method of online activism. Citizens of countries with stringent information regulations use sites such as Indymedia and Guerrilla News as outlets to express their political opinions, or to report human rights atrocities without being persecuted.
Examples of open publishing news sites include but are not limited to the following lists such as:
Although open publishing is best known for news distribution, there are many alternative ways in which open publishing technologies have been utilized.
Creative practitioners are able to use open publishing in order to allow others to modify and expand on their work. An artist, musician or photographer can now attach to their work custom made license agreements such as Creative Commons or the GNU Free Documentation License in order for their work to be used in another person’s creative practice. Authors can now open their entire novels up for peer review in order for others to comment or change what they believe to be the weaknesses of the work. An example of this is Lawerence Lessig’s book Code v.2 which he has placed on his site as a wiki, making it open for others to edit, contribute to or comment on.
Open publishing has also started a new trend in users becoming producers - or produsers. Through the rapid uptake of self produced content such as blogs, the everyday person now has the medium to have their work and opinions put into the public forum for others to comment on and build upon.
On sites such as Amazon and Ebay the public are invited to post reviews on products which they particularly liked or were disappointed with, in order for others to make a more informed choice about what they are purchasing. Travel guides have set up online and are no longer written by employees, rather, they are voluntarily contributed to by travelers themselves who have had travel experiences they wish to share with others. See for example World 66 or Attitude Travel.
Indymedia
Slashdot
Kuro5hin
Advogato
WikiNews
Creative Commons
GNU Free Documentation License
Code v.2
Amazon
Linux
Zine
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