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The Creation of Internet Communities: A Brief History of On-Line Distribution of Working Papers Through NEP, 1998-2010
Abstract
This paper adds to the growing literature on the formation of online communities from an historical perspective by telling of the emergence and development of a service for speedy, online distribution of recent additions to the broad literatures on economics and related areas called NEP: New Economics Papers as well as the online community that grew around it. We provide details of the social and technological challenges for its construction as well as the evolution of its governance. The development of NEP provides an illustrative example for the kind of new business models that have emerged as the Internet has been used by creative minds to provide existing services in a new way.
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This paper presents and analyses “NEP: New Economics Papers”, the current awareness service of the RePEc digital library. NEP is a human-mediated service. New items arriving in RePEc are examined by editors of subject-specific reports. This paper introduces NEP from a conceptual point of view and communicates how NEP fits into the evolving world of digital libraries. We then present summary statistics for the performance of NEP. We pay particular attention to the coverage ratio, and the redundancy of reports. Suggestions for improving the performance of NEP are discussed.
Two resources evolved in the early 1980s to serve the needs of the scientific computing community. These resources were Netlib, a software repository that facilitated distribution of public-domain software, and NA-Net, a file of analysts' contact information that eventually supported an online directory and newsletter digest. The authors who created Netlib and NA-Net explain the history of these resources and their continuing impact.
In this article I introduce the term “dot-org entrepreneurship” to refer to an Internet-based, non-proprietary endeavor that is oriented primarily around social cooperation, not market competition. My focus is a standards-setting consortium, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C, www.w3.org), created in 1994. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web (1989), was also the founder of the W3C. He formed the W3C as an organizational solution to a technological problem – the immanent balkanization of the Web’s core technical standards. Once the W3C was created, its biggest challenge was to establish a middle ground between two rival groups : representatives from profit-seeking, “dot-com” companies; and developers with ideological and practical commitments to open source software. The W3C eventually aligned itself more with the open source community, a decision that, in turn, created opportunities for other dot-org entrepreneurs to create standards bodies that would meet the needs of profit-seeking (dot-com) firms. For Berners-Lee to succeed with his dot-org entrepreneurship, he needed to establish an island of trust in a sea of competition and mistrust.
From its first glimmerings in the 1950s, the software industry has evolved to become the fourth largest industrial sector of the US economy. Starting with a handful of software contractors who produced specialized programs for the few existing machines, the industry grew to include producers of corporate software packages and then makers of mass-market products and recreational software. This book tells the story of each of these types of firm, focusing on the products they developed, the business models they followed, and the markets they served. By describing the breadth of this industry, Martin Campbell-Kelly corrects the popular misconception that one firm is at the center of the software universe. He also tells the story of lucrative software products such as IBM's CICS and SAP's R/3, which, though little known to the general public, lie at the heart of today's information infrastructure. With its wealth of industry data and its thoughtful judgments, this book will become a starting point for all future investigations of this fundamental component of computer history.
The US National Science Foundation played a key role in the history of the Internet by overseeing its transition from government to private operation. In the process, NSF was forced to balance the competing visions of scientists, politicians, and private industry. This article describes the conflicts, trade-offs, and unexpected events that led to a technical and social transformation of the Internet.
“NEP: New Economics Papers”, the current awareness service for the Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) digital library, is made possible by volunteer editors who filter new additions to RePEc into subject-specific reports. The official purpose of current awareness service is to filter working papers by subject matter without any judgment of its academic quality. In this article, binary logistic regression analysis (BLRA) estimates the probability of a paper being included in any of the subject reports as a function of a range of observable values. The analysis suggests that, contrary to their claims, editors use quality criteria: the series the paper is coming from and the reputation of the authors. The findings suggest that a current awareness service can issue quality signals.
This papers studies a special “small” information retrieval problem where user satisfaction only depends on the ordering of documents. We look for a retrieval performance measure applicable for this setting. We define some requirements for such a measure. We develop a theoretical ordering of all outcomes. We look at some standard and purpose-build measures and assess them against the requirements. We conclude that a linear combination of two such measures is adequate.
We investigate different approaches based on correlation analysis to reduce the complexity of a space of quantitative indicators for the assessment of research performance. The proposed methods group bibliometric indicators into clusters of highly intercorrelated ...
More and more academic journals are adopting an open access policy by which articles are accessible free of charge, while publication costs are recovered through author fees. We study the consequences of this open access policy on the quality standard of an electronic academic journal. If the journal's objective were to maximize social welfare, open access would be optimal. However, we show that if the journal has a different objective (such as maximizing readers' utility, the impact of the journal, or its profit), open access tends to induce it to choose a quality standard below the socially efficient level. (JEL L11, L82)
Obra que estudia la historia y el significado social del software libre. Se revisa el impacto cultural y jurídico que ha tenido el movimiento que promueve una programación libre sobre la transmisión del conocimiento.
In this paper, we discuss the provision of bibliographic data as an extension of the open source concept. Our particular concern is the sustainability of such endeavors. We describe the RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) project, probably the largest "open source" bibliographic database. It demonstrates that open-source bibliographic data collection is sustainable.
There has been a recent surge of interest in open source software development, which involves developers at many different locations and organizations sharing code to develop and refine programs. To an economist, the behavior of individual programmers and commercial companies engaged in open source projects is initially startling. This paper makes a preliminary exploration of the economics of open source software. We highlight the extent to which labor economics, especially the literature on "career concerns", and industrial organization theory can explain many of these projects' features. We conclude by listing interesting research questions related to open source software. Copyright 2002 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
After the engineers had built computer networks, users had to build the social networks that made them useful. Listserv, the combined mailing list and file server, was an important tool for those interested in building network-based organizations. It first appeared on Bitnet, an academic network based on IBM computers. The early versions of Listserv became operational in the mid-1980s and its early archives show how network users learned to use the software and, perhaps more importantly, how to manage network-based organizations.
This article describes the development of supercomputers over the past three decades in conjunction with the social relations surrounding the development and use of these machines. In early designs of supercomputers, the goal was to achieve the highest possible speed "at all cost"/spl minus/that is, without worrying about compatibility with previous machines. The first customers of these computers were national (defense) laboratories and large scientific institutions. Especially over the past decade, however, large industrial corporations have also started to use supercomputers. This expansion of the customer base subsequently affected the design process, as a wider range of customer requirements has to be satisfied and speed considerations are no longer unproblematically paramount.< >