Colleges and universities are as much about research as they are about the classroom experience, and just as open source software can provide cost savings, independence, and flexibility to educational institutions through courseware and recordkeeping, it can assist in the research process. Open source and open data standards play a role in collaboration, laboratory and literary scholarly research, publishing, and managing the overall research programs at institutions of higher learning.

References for Individuals and Institutions

Naturally, the role that software of any type plays in academic research varies greatly with the field of study. Software itself is at the center of computer science and physics simulation research, for example, while it plays more auxiliary roles such as data mining and statistical reporting in the social sciences. Literary criticism and history depends heavily on library work, where open source can provide important infrastructure.

Regardless of the field, however, collecting, studying, and tracking the work of predecessors and contemporaries is always critical, as evidenced by the large number of open source projects designed to help track sources and manage bibliographical resources. The simplest applications, such as I, Librarian, help the researcher collect, organize, and annotate reference material. Most such applications allow full-text and metadata searching of collected resources, and can be used to directly search online catalogs from publishers such as PubMed and arXiv, and major online reference sites like JSTOR and ARTstor, or Google Book Search and Google Scholar.

Full-featured reference management applications include Web-based tools like Aigaion, Connotea, and Wikindx, desktop applications like Referencer, Pybliographer, JabRef, and BibDesk, and specialty tools such as the Firefox extension Zotero and Bibus, which is designed to integrate with OpenOffice and with Microsoft Word. Most of these reference management applications add features beyond cataloging and searching, such as the ability to share collections with team members, manage multiple collections as projects, and the ability to automatically generate formatted citations for inclusion in a paper, in general BibTeX or EndNote format as well as in the preferred styles of major journals.

Several applications take the additional step of emphasizing the Web publication of collected bibliographies. BibCiter, refbase, and RefDB can be used to build online indices. Refbase and RefDB can be used to create searchable, personal archives of an author’s own work–a practice known as self-archiving–as well as larger institutional repositories collecting the research of individuals from entire organizations.

via Linux.com