Stimulating Collaborative Development in Operations Research with libOR

In this paper we describe the development of libOR, an on-line library for the operations research (OR) community. The design and operation of this website is inspired by the Open Source movement and recent developments such as Wikipedia. In operations research, data sets are exchanged between researchers in order to test the performance of newly developed algorithms. Currently, the exchange of these data sets suffers from many problems. One of the main problems is that data sets are currently exchanged through a centrally maintained website, which makes it slow to respond to new developments. By applying an Open Source approach to content creation, we hope to spur the diffusion of information within the operations research community.