(Bloomington, IN) The category of “scholarly communications” includes books and journal articles; datasets, maps, images, and software; and informal exchanges such as discussions at meetings, emails, blogs, gossip, and even resumes and letters of recommendation. Almost all of this material can now be digitized and stored perpetually for anyone to use. Knowledge is a “non-rivalrous” good; if I take some, there isn’t less for you. In fact, it is often cumulative: knowledge is worth more the more it is used, and each item becomes more valuable the more other items are also available. Thus knowledge can function as a “commons,” a public resource. On the other hand, there are problems. The main one is probably the “provisioning problem”: finding a way to pay for, or otherwise encourage, the creation of free goods.
Monthly Archives: April 2004
Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis
I’m at the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at the University of Indiana. There’s an excellent conference here on “Scholarly Communications as a Commons.” I’m going to save commenting on that topic until tomorrow, when I’ll have more time for blogging and I may understand the issues a bit better. For today, I would like to praise the Workshop briefly (as I have before, in print). It seems to me absolutely exemplary as a home for engaged scholarship. The work of Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues involves close collaboration with communities; it generates information useful to those communities, while drawing on their knowledge; and it produces cutting-edge insights and methodologies of great importance to the social sciences. Ostrom’s insights could not arise without her community engagement. Thus she demonstrates that engagement can be more than just “service,” or a transfer of knowledge to people outside a university–it can be an essential form of inquiry.