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Open source software (OSS) communities devoted to the development of electronic medical records (EMRs) have grown in recent years. The purpose of this paper is to focus on the challenge the leaders of these communities face in terms of building perceptions of psychological ownership among community members.

Surveys (n = 50) and brief interviews (n = 56) with individual members of an open source EMR community (most of whom are based in African nations) were used.

Among community members, normative commitment (in comparison to extrinsic motivation and affective commitment) was the strongest predictor of psychological ownership. Interviews revealed that community members tended to feel a greater sense of ownership toward the end user (i.e. hospitals and clinics) than toward the community itself.

To foster engagement and retention – and enhance the worldwide impact of their community on healthcare practices – leaders of open source EMR communities can offer incentives related to certifications and status-based rewards, hold annual meetings to allow members to develop a better understanding of the community and encourage members to “pay it forward” by involving end users (i.e. hospital and clinic employees) within the community, thus furthering public health initiatives.

OSS communities experience unique challenges compared to traditional organizations. This necessitates a reconsideration of the applicability of commonly accepted principles, tenets and recommendations from the management literature.

The purpose of this paper is to argue in favor of the open hardware philosophy (open-source hardware – OSH) as a technological innovation and academic entrepreneurshipmodel in Brazil.

This argument is based on three pillars. The first one refers to a bibliographic review of theoretical frameworks related to academic entrepreneurship and technological innovation to emphasize the disruptive innovation capacity of academia. Second, a few elements related to the Brazilian political, economic and structural scenario, which entail a (more) favorable environment to technological innovation and academic entrepreneurship, is presented. Finally, concepts related to OSH and its business model are approached to demonstrate the facilitating effect toward the whole process.

As a result of the argument made herein, it is possible to perceive the viability of the OSH model in terms of entrepreneurship and technological innovation in the academic sphere, and to perceive its benefits before social and economic needs in areas such as health and education.

There are no empirical or quantifiable data in the literature that enable comparison between OSH and traditional technological innovation models.

The considerations on the philosophical value of OSH and its business models are scarcely explored in international literature. As far as we know, relating OSH to technological innovation entrepreneurship in the academic sphere, as well as its singularities in Brazil regarding the innovation national system and social and economic demands, is a unique approach in literature.

Rising operational costs and software sustainment concerns have driven the Air Force to move to newer technology to ensure that the Air Force Standard Base Supply System (SBSS) can continue to provide affordable and sustainable mission support in the years to come. This paper aims to summarize the successful software modernization effort the Air Force undertook to achieve that objective.

The paper describes the preliminary system updates that were required to isolate the SBSS software from all internal and external system and user interfaces in preparation for the subsequent successful code roll effort. Once the legacy SBSS component was fully isolated, the SBSS software modernization objective was achieved via a “code roll” conversion of the SBSS software from legacy COBOL to Java code, and movement of the integrated logistics system-supply application from a proprietary information technology (IT) platform to an open IT operating environment.

The SBSS system modernization yielded immediate and significant IT operational cost reductions and provided an important foundation for achieving Air Force logistics system consolidation and cloud computing objectives going forward.

The SBSS modernization experience should be useful in assisting similar data system software modernization efforts.

Triggered by the advancement of information and communications technology, open access repositories (a variant of digital libraries) is one of the important changes impacting library services. In the context of openness to a wider community to access free resources, Wawasan Open University Library initiated a research project to build open access repositories on open educational resources. Open educational resources (OER) is an area of a multifaceted open movement in education. The purpose of this paper is to show how two web portal repositories on OER materials were developed adopting a Japanese open source software, called WEKO.

The design approach is based on a pull to push strategy whereby metadata of scholarly open access materials kept within the institution and network communities’ digital databases were harvested using the Open Archives Initiatives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting method into another open knowledge platform for discovery by other users.

Positive results emanating from the university open access repositories development showed how it strengthen the role of the librarian as manager of institutional assets and successfully making the content freely available from this open knowledge platform for reuse in learning and teaching.

Developing further programmes to encourage, influence faculty members and prospective stakeholders to use and contribute content to the valuable repositories is indeed a challenging task.

This paper provides insight for academic libraries on how open access repositories development and metadata analysis can enhance new professional challenges for information professionals in the field of data management, data quality and intricacies of supporting data repositories and build new open models of collaboration across institutions and libraries. This paper also describes future collaboration work with institutions in sharing their open access resources.

This paper addresses a gap in research literature in the fields of blockchain technology (BC), supply chain network dynamics (SC) and network effect phenomena (NE). Extant BC and SC literature describes the potential benefits to be reaped through the adoption of BC technology. While BC technology does not yet meet the researched expectations of adoption, performance and efficacy, the authors analyze the three inter-related fields (BC, SC and NE) to bridge this gap in theory.

This paper begins with a research review correlating the technological fundamentals of BC technology into fundamental value propositions for SC logistics contexts. The authors review the gap between these theoretical technological functions and the current ecosystem of BC applications. With an overarching understanding of BC in SC contexts, this paper then explores the phenomena of NE and attempts to synthesize various interrelated aspects of the three fields (BC, SC and NE). Research frameworks from extant literature are used for cross-comparing legacy software/information system solutions with potential and existing BC-based solutions. Case studies are utilized to support this analysis.

Several key considerations and themes are identified to better inform practitioner and researcher decision-making. Novel insights pertain to BC platform architecture and application modularity, integrated governance and decision-making capabilities, and the automation capabilities that arise from a healthy application and smart contract ecosystem.

The core contribution is the synthesis of network effect theory with SC phenomena and BC theory and the exploration of how these three fields are inter-related in the maturation of BC technology. Specifically, the authors deepen insights from extant literature by contextualizing findings with relevant interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks.

A user-friendly HTML-based open-source software has been developed for structural shielding design of medical X-ray imaging facilities. Based on values published by the NCRP Report N° 147 the software allows thickness calculations for different materials used in conventional X-ray rooms, mammography rooms and computed tomography rooms, diminishing errors resulting from the use of curves. The software focuses on the optimization principle by considering workload distributions instead of applying all the workload at a single high operating potential. The input data can be those recommended by the NCRP Report N° 147 or, if the facility has its own data, they can be used instead. With the implemented methodology, the code validation was performed by comparison of the results with a study case provided by the Report. The software application is available in two languages (English and Spanish) and provides the accuracy of the method presented, as well as assisting the physicist in shielding computations in a user-friendly manner. This software tool is available upon request to the corresponding author.