Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-Pool Resource

The goal of this paper is to summarize the lessons learned from a large body of international, interdisciplinary research on common-pool resources (CPRs) in the past 25 years and consider its usefulness in the analysis of scholarly information as a resource. We will suggest ways in which the study of the governance and management of common-pool resources can be applied to the analysis of information and \u27the intellectual public domain.\u27 The complexity of the issues is enormous for many reasons: the vast number of players, multiple conflicting interests, rapid changes of technology, the general lack of understanding of digital technologies, local versus global arenas, and a chronic lack of precision about the information resource at hand. We suggest, in the tradition of Hayek, that the combination of time and place analysis with general scientific knowledge is necessary for sufficient understanding of policy and action. In addition, the careful development of an unambiguous language and agreed-upon definitions is imperative. As one of the framing papers for the Conference on the Public Domain, we focus on the language, the methodology, and outcomes of research on common-pool resources in order to better understand how various types of property regimes affect the provision, production, distribution, appropriation, and consumption of scholarly information. Our analysis will suggest that collective action and new institutional design play as large a part in the shaping of scholarly information as do legal restrictions and market forces

The Knowledge Commons: Theory and Collective Action; or Kollektive Aktionismus?

Keynote address presented at the Wizards of OS 3: The Future of the Digital Commons,” An International conference held at the Berliner Congress Center, Alexanderplatz, Berlin, Germany, 10-12 June 2004

Dilemmas of Building a Sustainable Equitable Information Resource. Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, Indiana University

From Page 1: Because information plays a central role in environmental and CPR research, the quality, flow, and timeliness of of intellectual resources are crucial. The development agency community repeatedly stresses the intricate relationship between information access and economic development (UNDP, 1997; Mchombu, 1996; McConnell, 1996; Baranshamaje, 1995; Valantin, 1996). International information specialists write about the urgent need for local, appropriate information in locally-designed libraries which better serve local, indigenous communities (Alemna, 1996; Matare, 1997; Kuntze, 1996; Ifidon, 1990). Better accountability and communication of scientific information by researchers is also being voiced more frequently . In his keynote address at the 1996 IASCP conference, Marshall Murphee called for colleagues to take on the responsibility to actively share their knowledge and insights with communities and policymakers outside the academic arena \u27who can use them to make a real difference\u27 (Murphee 1996, 2). Neal Lane, Director of the National Science Foundation, urges researchers to become \u27civil scientists\u27 by reaching out to the public and engaging in \u27genuine public dialogue with their local communities\u27 (Lane 1997). In this paper I examine some of the perplexing problems facing scholarly information as an essential and fundamental resource. My intention is to bring stronger attention to the changing nature of academic information, and the need to design new institutions for the access and distribution of environmental and CPR information. Examples are drawn from my research on academic libraries in Uganda and the U.S. While the dilemmas of managing an exponentially growing resource are on a global scale, strategies for better information management, like natural resources, must be designed at the local level

The Unfolding of the Knowledge Commons

This piece reports on some of the significant research and activities within the knowledge commons arena since the publication of Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom’s co-edited book Understanding Knowledge as a Commons in 2007. Hess uses this overview to identify major lacunae in the study of the knowledge commons. First, the relationship between local, indigenous knowledge and more globalised forms of knowledge is poorly understood. Second, the principles of local commons have not yet been tested against global commons, which may be characterised by regional inequalities. In both regards, careful case studies are needed to enrich our understanding of the knowledge commons

Private and Common Property Rights

The relative advantages of private property and common property for the efficiency, equity, and sustainability of natural resource use patterns have long been debated in the legal and economics literatures. The debate has been clouded by a troika of confusions that relate to the difference between (1) common-property and open-access regimes, (2) common-pool resources and common-property regimes, and (3) a resource system and the flow of resource units. A property right is an enforceable authority to undertake particular actions in specific domains. The rights of access, withdrawal, management, exclusion, and alienation can be separately assigned to different individuals as well as being viewed as a cumulative scale moving from the minimal right of access through possessing full ownership rights. Some attributes of common-pool resources are conducive to the use of communal proprietorship or ownership and others are conducive to individual rights to withdrawal, management, exclusion and alienation. There are, however, no panaceas! No institutions generate better outcomes for the resource and for the users under all conditions. Many of the lessons learned from the operation of communal property regimes related to natural resource systems are theoretically relevant to understanding of a wide diversity of property regimes that are extensively used in modern societies

A Framework for Analysing the Microbiological Commons

In an earlier article, “Ideas, artifacts and facilities: information as a common-pool resource”, we examined the role of collective action in building robust knowledge commons and in circumventing trends of enclosure and privatisation of the intellectual public domain. Our analysis suggested that collective action and new institutional design play as large a part in shaping the collection, distribution, and preservation of scholarly information as do legal restrictions and market forces. The microbiological commons extends well beyond the boundaries of e-prints and other full-text research documents that are the focus of the open access movement. It includes the contents of scientific databases, research archives, and multimedia publications which all need to be seamlessly integrated. In addition, the global, biological commons is also comprised of social networks and social capital. The success of freely sharing microbiological data will require a complex blend of technology, scientific content, metadata standards, open source software packages, negotiated and respected intellectual property rights agreements, sustainability and preservation design mechanisms, evolving rules and institutions, and, ultimately, a firm commitment on the part of providers and users to the common good

A Framework for Analyzing the Knowledge Commons : a chapter from Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: from Theory to Practice.

Who hasn’t heard of the six blind men of Indostan encircled around an elephant?1 The six—one a political scientist, one a librarian, one an economist, one a law professor, one a computer scientist, and one an anthropologist—discover, based on their own investigations, that the object before them is a wall, spear, a snake, a tree, a fan, and a rope. The story fits well with the question that propelled this chapter: how can an interdisciplinary group of scholars best analyze a highly complex, rapidly evolving, elephantine resource such as knowledge? Trying to get one’s hands around knowledge as a shared resource is even more challenging when we factor in the economic, legal, technological, political, social and psychological components—each complex in their own right—that make up this global commons

The Calculus of Commitment: The Ostroms, The Workshop and The Commons

When Elinor Ostrom was interviewed at Indiana University after winning the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for her study of economic governance, particularly the commons, she said \u27The prize did come to me personally, but it would never have come but for the work I did with Vincent Ostrom all these years and the Workshop.\u27 This piece ponders those humble words by a world-renown scholar through an—albeit brief—examination of the decades-long collaboration between Lin and Vincent Ostrom: two brilliant minds committed to better understanding the complexities of human behavior and the challenges of cooperation