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In the wake of growing pressures to make scholarly knowledge commercially relevant via translation into intellectual property, various techno-scientific communities have mobilized to create open access/open source experiments. These efforts are based on the ideas and success of free and open source software, and generally try to exploit two salient features: increased openness and circulation, and distributed collective innovation. Transferring these ideas from software to science often involves unforeseen challenges, one of which is that these movements can be deemed, often incorrectly, as heretical by university administrators and technology transfer officers who valorize metrics such as number of patents filed and granted, spin-off companies created, and revenue generated. In this paper, we discuss nascent efforts to foster an open source movement in nanotechnology and provide an illustrative case of an arsenic removal invention. We discuss challenges facing the open source nano movement that include making a technology widely accessible and the associated politics of metrics.

Purpose – This study attempts to explore further the relation between performance information and trust as the main control levers in inter-firm transactional relationships.

Design/methodology/approach – After discussing the interaction between information and trust from different theoretical perspectives, the study examines the case of a multinational company working in the pharmaceutical industry. Material has been collected through interviews with managers and documental analyses, focusing on the relations between the company and its partner suppliers.

Findings – A theoretical systematisation is provided, distinguishing three main perspectives: (1) the transactional perspective, strictly derived from transaction cost economics assumptions, which denies any role to trust; (2) the relational perspective, which, in examining inter-firm trust, assumes similarities with inter-personal trust; (3) the institutional perspective, which, based on the sociological distinction of “trust in abstract systems” and “trust in persons”, is intended to identify institutional factors explaining management accounting changes. Case discussion shows that the institutional propositions fit the empirical evidence better, for both trust in persons and in systems are important as control levers, but their relevance differs along the value chain: while trust in persons is more relevant in the less-programmable phases, trust in systems is more developed in the more programmable one.

Research implications – The paper contributes to the literature on inter-organisational control by providing more insights into the interaction between information and trust as control levers.

Originality/value – The focus on value chain phases enables us to analyse how different control patterns or archetypes can be co-present in a given relationship.