MARCO TEORICO 1 CARIES

The solution to the challenge of these gravitational hubs is strong community institutions that can act to preserve community autonomy and agency and to limit the accumulation of capital by non-community actors. There is, however, a problem here. For such an institution to be able to act in such a way it must itself have sufficient critical mass, and therefore capital, to be an effective economic actor. It must, in fact, be a gravitational hub in its own right.

If this is true, then what principled stance can be taken to define which of these hubs is ‘good’ and which ‘bad’? One approach, championed by many in the community, is to define not-for-profit organisations as good, and for-profit organisations as bad, or at least to require that for-profit players have their areas of action limited. Another common argument is that small organisations are preferred over large ones. However, many of our examples illustrate that this criterion is, at best, a poor heuristic. It could be argued that Crossref and ORCID (both not-for-profits) only exist due to the actions of large for-profit publishers. Both are valuable because of their scale and domination of the identifier space. Both have raised concerns due to the same issues. In addition, examples like bepress (bepress. com) and HighWire Press (highwirepress.com)

– where not-for-profit operations were sold to for-profit operators – show that local tax status does not prevent acquisition. Equally, not for profit status does not prevent an organisation operating alongside and with the same motivations as for-profit entities.

These are largely well-worn arguments. A new insight arises out of the idea that community institutions need to act as pools of capital. That is, in many jurisdictions a not-for-profit status can prevent a community from investing in those institutions. While we may invest time, effort and attention into these institutions we are, in many cases, legally prohibited from investing financially in them. This creates an asymmetry which empowers financial capital, and therefore commercial organisations without these restrictions, to exercise greater leverage. The growing interest in organisational forms such as Benefit Corporations (USA)37 _{and Community Interest}

Companies (UK)38 _{is a response to this.}

Some of the initiatives taken by Ubiquity Press (ubiquitypress.com/), a privately held for-profit UK company, to seek community trust provide a mirror to this approach. The development of community contracts and other approaches to create strong commitments on future strategy and behaviour, but not limiting investment and capital growth, are interesting in this respect. Hindawi Publishing (hindawi.com), another for-profit entity, has similarly sought to articulate principles by which for-profit entities can interact with scholarly communities, while still retaining the advantages of for-profit status and still being motivated by financial returns.

Footnotes

37 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation

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Open Scholarship and the need for collective action Institutions and collective action

Alternative approaches to creating pools of financial capital amongst more traditional scholarly community organisations are also emerging. The Global

Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) (scoss.org) is one example of an organisation set up to enable the pooling of capital. Funding

initiatives including the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) (dfg.de/en/research_

funding/programmes/nfdi/index.html), OA2020

(https://oa2020.org), and the ELIXIR Core Data

Resources for the life sciences initiative (biorxiv.org/

content/10.1101/598318v1) are examples of funders

and other partners pooling capital – partly financial, partly social – to collectively move an agenda forward. These initiatives are social and political institutions focused around governance. Some commercial entities, particularly smaller and less well-capitalised ones, see benefits in gaining greater community trust, itself a form of network capital, through voluntarily constraining their actions. Such constraints will only engender community trust if they are based on community-defined

governance requirements. Such requirements are institutions in their own right, requiring their own network capital to have power.

Elinor Ostrom in Governing the Commons (Ostrom 1991) notes that the surface solution to many problems of collective action is the existence of a supporting institution – such as agreed governance framework requirements. One example the Nobel Prize-winner points to is the existence of the court system for dispute resolution. However, such a supporting institution creates this form of ‘second order provisioning problem’.

One conclusion for Open Scholarship is that, if we are to purposely design new institutions, we must avoid an infinite regress of such provisioning problems, and build on existing institutions, such as shared norms, existing pools of capital and prestige.

Even if our goal is radical change in practice, we must build it on foundations that currently exist.

This points us to a more sophisticated answer to the question of how we recognise the ‘good’ institutions. The answer lies in the forms of governance and the role of community in that governance but this can easily become circular. If the answer to ‘what is a good institution?’ is ‘one with good governance’ then we have simply shifted the problem to one of what constitutes good governance. This is also another example of the second order provisioning issue. The logic of this book is to seek an answer based in economic analysis; one that utilises our understanding of markets, collective action and capital in the context of globalised networks of scholarship. Gravitational hubs collect capital and network connections to themselves. This is true whether they are ‘good’ or ‘bad’. The critical question is how that capital is

reinvested. Does it return to a community, a structure in the broader network, or is it extracted? This allows us, in principle, to judge a non-commercial vs a commercial institution. What is the return on investment? What proportion of attracted capital flows to strengthening network connections beyond those directly linked to the hub? What is the outflow to external investors beyond the community? Fundamentally, what value is being created that is meaningful to us?

Another way to ask this question is, what are the goods that are being created? Are they private goods? Are they rivalrous and excludable and therefore not accessible to the community that funds them? Or are they more public-like? In practice, as we have noted, in the academic landscape many of the important goods will fall in between these extremes, being variously common pool resources or club goods. The goals of Open Scholarship in a networked context can be framed as an effort to ensure that gravitational hubs are managed effectively as common pool resources or club

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goods, with efforts and institutions put in place that aim to make them more public-like, taking full advantage of the reduction in rivalry in the digital space.

The governance of scholarly common