ABSTRACT
The Virtues of Openness examines the complex history of the concept of the "open society", the "open text", and the written word. It investigates the social processes and policies that foster openness as an overriding educational and scientific value, evidenced in the growth of open source, open access, open education, and their convergences characterize global knowledge communities. Openness has emerged as an alternative mode of social production based on the growing and overlapping complexities of open source, open access, open archiving, and open publishing. Openness gave birth to the Internet, open-source code reflects a commitment by software developers to keep the code public so that others can share in the knowledge in order to replicate and modify it; yet open code is still able to be regulated, although the degree of regulability depends on the nature of its architecture. This introduction presents key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book.
