Juho Lindman

Journal copyright restrictions and actual open access availability: a study of articles published in eight top information systems journals (2010---2014)

Most scholarly journals have explicit copyright restrictions for authors outlining how published articles, or earlier manuscript versions of such articles, may be distributed on the open web. Empirical research on the development of open access (OA) is still scarce and methodologically fragmented, and research on the relationship between journal copyright restrictions and actual free online availability is non-existent. In this study the free availability of articles published in eight top journals within the field of Information Systems (IS) is analyzed by observing the availability of all articles published in the journals during 2010–2014 (1515 articles in total) through the use of Google and Google Scholar. The web locations and document versions of retrieved articles for up to three OA copies per published article were categorized manually. The web findings were contrasted to journal copyright information and augmented with citation data for each article. Around 60xa0% of all published articles were found to have an OA copy available. The findings suggest that copyright restrictions weakly regulate actual author-side dissemination practice. The use of academic social networks (ASNs) for enabling online availability of research publications has grown increasingly popular, an avenue of research dissemination that most of the studied journal copyright agreements failed to explicitly accommodate.

Investigating Relationships Between FLOSS Foundations and FLOSS Projects

Foundations function as vital institutional support infrastructures for many of the most successful open source projects, but the role of these support entities remains an understudied phenomenon in FLOSS research. Drawing on Open Hub (formerly known as Ohloh) data, this paper empirically investigates the different ways these entities support projects and interact with different projects and with each other.

Latent Groups in Online Communities: a Longitudinal Study in Wikipedia

Research on online communities has shown that content production involves manifest groups and latent users. This paper conceptualizes a related but distinct phenomenon of latent groups. We ground this contribution in a longitudinal study on the Finnish Wikipedia (2007–2014). In the case of experts working on content within their area of expertise, individuals can constitute a group that maintains itself over time. In such a setting, it becomes viable to view the group as an acting unit instead of as individual nodes in a network. Such groups are able to sustain their activities even over periods of inactivity. Our theoretical contribution is the conceptualization of latent groups, which includes two conditions: 1) a group is capable of reforming after inactivity (i.e., dormant), and 2) a group is difficult to observe to an outsider (i.e., non-manifest).

Support mechanisms provided by FLOSS foundations and other entities

Foundations function as a vital institutional support infrastructure for many of the most successful open-source projects, but the different roles played by these support entities are understudied in Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) research. Drawing on Open Hub (formerly known as Ohloh) data, this paper empirically investigates how these entities support projects and interact with other projects. This study was conducted using the Theoretical Saturation Grounded Theory approach given the large volume of data on hand. The findings are synthesized as a taxonomy of support entities, a categorization of support mechanisms and a set of dynamics of the interactions between different FLOSS support entities.

Goals, Workflow, and Value: Case Study Experiences with Three Modeling Frameworks

It is beneficial to understand the benefits and drawbacks of enterprise modeling approaches in certain contexts. We report experiences applying different combinations of three modeling approaches to industrial cases. Specifically, we report on experiences from four companies using a combination of goal modeling, e3 value modeling, and workflow modeling. Our findings help to guide enterprise modeling approach selection in similar contexts, and can be used to make recommendations to improve future applications of the selected modeling approaches.

Mobile Applications as Carriers of Institutional Pressures: A Case of the Finnish Taxi Industry

While the worldwide market expansion of Uber has raised controversy, Uber has also received praise for its mobile phone app. Its many features – taxi ordering, pricing, real-time location information, paying, and service evaluation – have provided significant customer value. When Uber entered Finland in November 2014, few other taxi apps were available. Between 2014 and 2018, this shortage of taxi apps turned into an abundance, with many companies introducing their own taxi apps. By leaning on institutional theory, and more specifically by applying coercive, mimetic and normative pressures as a lens, we provide an explanation for why three Finnish taxi apps now resemble Uber in some features, whereas they differ in others. Based on our interviews, we can explain the present-day differences between these apps by coercive and normative pressures in the institutional environment of the Finnish taxi industry. We contribute to the IT and institutionalization research stream by illustrating how mobile applications as IT artefacts can be seen as carriers of institutional pressures materializing in the features they provide.

Emerging Perspectives of API Strategy [Unedited]

Software specialists increasingly find themselves in situations where their API-related decisions have strong implications on software business. Through long-lasting research collaboration with API-responsible software specialists and several large software-intensive companies, we have established a strategic API framework to aid in consideration of business concerns when designing, updating, or maintaining APIs. We provide the following actionable insights in this article: 1) our framework combines multiple layers and perspectives that provided value for our partners in their in API design, 2) the framework helps API designers to better organize their design decisions amongst various business and technical concerns and 3) the framework supports development of holistic API strategies, as it supports: APIs as objects of digital innovation, allowing to derive important boundary objects; BAPO perspective on API development; and consideration of API governance. We use anonymized examples from our partners to illustrate the application of the framework.

Experiences Applying \(\hbox {e}^{3}\) Value Modeling in a Cross-Company Study

Driven by business interests, (product/customer) value has become a critical topic in system and software engineering as well as enterprise planning. The conceptual modeling community has responded to this challenge with several modeling approaches, including e3 value modeling, focusing on capturing and analyzing value flows in value networks. This modeling approach has risen from practical e-commerce experiences and has been further studied in an academic context. In this experience paper, we report the advantages and disadvantages of applying e3 value modeling as part of a cross-company case study focusing on understanding the internal and external value of APIs from a strategic perspective. We found that value modeling was generally well-received and understood by the company representatives, but also found drawbacks when used in our context, including challenges in modeling internal value networks, capturing problematic or missing values, finding quantitative value measures, and showing underlying motivations for flows. Our findings can help to improve language aspects, methods and tools, and can help to guide future value analysis in similar contexts.

Measuring Perceived Trust in Open Source Software Communities

We investigate the different aspects of measuring trust in Open Source Software (OSS) communities. In the theoretical part we review seminal works related to trust in OSS development. This investigation provides background to our empirical part where we measure trust in a community (in terms of kudo). Our efforts provide further avenues to develop trust-based measurement tools. These are helpful for academics and practitioners interesting in quantifiable traits of OSS trust.

Before the Sense of 'We': Identity Work as a Bridge from Mass Collaboration to Group Emergence

Individuals engaged in mass collaboration in Wikipedia may join to work recurrently with the same partners. It may well be that a significant portion of Wikipedia content is produced this way. Therefore, it is important to study how such groups emerge. In this paper, we argue how such recurrence may involve identity work that creates a sense of we-ness. We provide a case from Wikipedia, focusing on how individual Wikipedians came together to work on a collaborative Feature Article task. Furthermore, the same people came together in other content collaborations, and they identified themselves as a group. The findings suggest that identity work can bridge mass collaborations to the emergence of smaller-scale sustained groups. Our theoretical contribution brings together research streams on mass collaboration, group dynamics, and identity. This offers interesting pathways for further research.