[TOS] FOSS Journals

[Mel Chua]

On 01/26/2012 01:51 PM, Don Davis wrote:
> Which (FOSS) journals are list members reading/relying on/submitting to?
> I'm looking for journals outside the scope of IEEE and ACM...

I... would love to know if people have better ideas, because I've had 
multi-hour sit-down sessions with *three* librarians from *different* 
libraries by now and we're still scratching our heads a bit.

FOSS-centric journals (in English, anyway)? I've found one: 
http://www.igi-global.com/journal/international-journal-open-source-software/1123 
-- which as far as I can tell is (1) expensive and (2) not in my library 
(I can check, though). So I haven't gotten to take a look to see what 
it's got and how good it is. If anyone has access to this I would *love* 
to hear what you think of it (even as a quick glance) -- is it worth me 
asking librarians at Purdue to help me chase it down? The articles look 
super-interesting: 
http://www.igi-global.com/journal-contents/international-journal-open-source-software/1123

And then there's random stuff here and there. You said you were looking 
outside ACM and IEEE, so here goes.

I've found some FOSS-related papers in the International Journal of 
Software Engineering & Knowledge Engineering (for example: "An empirical 
analysis of the open source development process based on mining of 
source code repositories") There's also stuff like "Public participation 
in proprietary software development through user roles and discourse" in 
the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, and at least one 
Wikipedia-related article in the International Journal of Technology 
Management ("'Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia' as a role model? Lessons 
for open innovation from an exploratory examination of the supposedly 
democratic-anarchic nature of Wikipedia.")

In other words, it's scattershot. There doesn't seem to be a rhyme or 
reason to this yet. You can start ranging outside computing-related 
stuff into the fields of law and econ, anthro and sociology, management 
studies... I mean, if that's what you're looking for, I can share more 
stuff, but it's probably a little far afield -- and pretty much equally 
scattershot.

In my extremely limited "I've completed one semester of grad school" 
experience (DISCLAIMER!), everything is... spotty. It's not like you'll 
find tons of articles on open source in any one journal. And authors who 
write about open source tend to write one article in one journal, 
another article in another journal... so as far as I can tell it's 
impossible to fix your sights on a few targets and harvest a continuing 
stream of good information, you have to constantly hunter-gatherer.

But then again, that's what happens when stuff is emergent -- or so I'm 
told. Maybe my professors are trying to make me feel better, though. :)

--Mel