We have emphasised the shift towards a more public- like nature of knowledge goods driven by the transition from a print-based analogue world to one of digital networked scholarship. It is also worth noting that the idea of knowledge as a public good has deep roots. It underpins the justifications for monopoly rights such as copyright and patents, which in their original form were intended to encourage the dissemination of knowledge. It has deep roots in the culture of western scholarship. That these values are never fully followed in practice does not make them unimportant. Indeed the compromises that have limited their expression, the technical limits on dissemination, the institutionalisation of scholarship, professionalisation, careerism and all that is attached to that are at the centre of our narrative. The ongoing tension between dissemination of
knowledge and exploitation and control over the value created by its application is part of the motivation for seeking an economic analysis. The sudden shift in the rivalry and exclusion that has resulted from the shift to online digital scholarship has only brought these issues more clearly into view.
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Open Scholarship and the need for collective action Analysing action at the community level
Competitive markets and self-interest are, or at least seem to be, an inevitable characteristic of human interactions. As the goods in play in scholarship
became less rivalrous and less exclusive it was therefore inevitable that existing systems of markets, organisations, clubs and communities would falter in their ability to deliver an acceptable compromise in the production of these public-like goods. In particular, the fudges and compromises through which we linked the production of knowledge as a public-like (but still in practice rather exclusive) good to the financial systems that support it were inevitably going to be challenged.
In truth, markets never solved these problems. A combination of institutions, clubs, communities and processes of training and membership that supported them did. The idea that market competition could ever solve this problem illustrates both how radical the reshaping of our institutions has been, and how blinded we are to systems, rules and restrictions in which we operate. Merton (Merton, 1973) identified this clearly, well before the economists caught up, showing how our institutional systems and our desire to be a part of them led to the cooperative behaviours and collective action that made scholarship operate in the first half of the 20th century.
The challenge is, therefore, how to build new institutions that support our collective action where self-interest will not deliver. In a world in which the rivalry and excludability that aligned well with content and access subscription models is decreased, systems that rely on that revenue need to change. This change may be quantitative or qualitative in nature. At the same time, access to goods that are becoming less rivalrous, such as the attention and time of expert editors and referees, needs to be carefully considered. Market competition cannot be expected to solve the problem of supporting communities of curators. Alongside this, the new technical world with its large- scale networks requires new infrastructures to work efficiently. Again, as public-like goods, these will not be
provided by market competition. The underlying
structure of our dissemination networks, once based on physical transport of books to a relatively small set of defined places, now allowing nearly cost-free movement from and to trillions of locations, requires new kinds of supporting infrastructures that are more public-like and more ‘infrastructural’ than they have ever been.
In turn these new infrastructures have supported a substantial increase in inclusion and equity. More actors from more places can engage with scholarship. This in turn put those existing systems, journals, communities, under strain as dropping exclusion leads to congestion, precisely as classical club and collective action
economics predict. Peer review is under strain. Publishers are concerned about the technical issues and bandwidth required to support machine readability. Universities and scholarly communities continue to struggle with issues of diversity and inclusion. The consequences of this strain, congestion in access to the club good, previously controlled through exclusion, lead to increasing rivalry.
Increasing equity and access are core values of Open Scholarship. Our naive market analysis of the costs of digital production and dissemination has led to
assumptions about a reduction in costs that aligns with these goals. Opening up access to resources increases the potential usage of those resources, and hence increases the risk of potential overuse. Making club goods less exclusive at the same time can make a club good rivalrous. A transition towards a more open model, then, requires provisions to prevent overuse and associated collective action problems, also described as the tragedy of the commons. The solution to this is, as Ostrom (Ostrom 1991) described, institutions and community governance that manage these depletable and excludable resources effectively.