Awareness and Use of Open Source Software by Social Scientists

This study is done to assess the level of awareness and usage of Open Source Software (OSS) for research and teaching amongst the teachers of social science disciplines. A structured questionnaire was designed with open-and close-ended questions and circulated amongst the social science teachers of Pondicherry University. Analyses revealed that most of the respondents use proprietary software for research, OSS is used more in e-learning than proprietary e-learning software, majority of respondents use proprietary operating system for both teaching and research and the open source Internet browser is mostly used by the respondents for accessing information for teaching and research from the Internet. A good number of the respondents are making use of OSS but many of them face problems using them at times. There are few more of them who make use of OSS, without knowing the fact that it is OSS. All of them agreed that more of training/workshops should be conducted on OSS for better utilisation and output.