Open-Access Information Commons

Discussion

Lukas Peter:

"Higher education can generally be understood as one of the key ways that a society creates experts and intellectuals in diverse fields of knowledge. In the tradition of the Enlightenment, a central aim of universities is to produce scientific knowledge that will hopefully advance people in their understanding of the world. It is assumed that this knowledge will make people freer in both the sense that it will free them from false beliefs and increase the range of possibilities for action. This occurs through the broad dissemination of information and knowledge to the wider public – and the ability of non-experts to access this information. Scientific information is thus a vital resource for political participation, critical deliberation and effective policy-making in democratic societies (Dewey 1946: 208-9). In this sense, we can say that universities and scientific information have a public function: to educate society.

If we look at the state of higher education and scientific information in many countries around the world today, it is unclear whether universities currently fulfill this purpose. Here however, we will not focus on the well-known problems of soaring university fees and student debt. My focus will, instead, be on what some might consider a sideshow: academic journals. Simply put, the problem of academic journals is that they enclose and privatize scientific information. The costs of access to individual scientific articles for people who are not affiliated with academic institutions (which is the greater part of the world’s population) are generally very high.6 One reason for these high costs is, largely, the concentration of ownership of academic journals in the hands of a few corporations (Larivière et al. 2015). As can be expected, profits in this field are therefore also very high.

But the more fundamental reason for these large profits is that the knowledge is provided to these corporations for free. Importantly, and in contrast to newspapers, for example, the information is not created, reviewed or edited by the journals themselves, but instead provided for free by academics (Bergstrom 2001; McGuigan/Russel 2008). Additionally, copyright in articles is usually handed over to the journals (Hilty 2007). Academics, universities and the public are therefore obliged to buy their own research back from corporations that merely package the publicly funded information. It appears, therefore, that private journal publishers extract profit from research communities by enclosing and restricting access to publicly funded scientific knowledge commons (Berg 2012). From a socio-economic perspective, and analogously to the problem of research and development in the field of health and medicine, I would argue that the privatization of information can limit collaboration and innovation and lead to the tragedy of an anti-commons – not necessarily between researchers, who often have access to the journals, but rather between the scientific community and the broader non-academic public. From a socio-political perspective, expensive, private academic journals ultimately undermine the educational function of universities and research in an informed and self-reflective democratic society.

The widespread privatization of scientific information in academic journals is unique in two respects. Not only are the infrastructure and the labor that go into research often funded by the public. Furthermore,digital information –and knowledge in general – is often considered to be the exemplary non-exclusory and nonrival good (Stiglitz 1999; Hess/Ostrom 2007). In our terminology, we could say that digital information and knowledge are highly inclusive and additive. The fact that one person can consume information and simultaneously enable other people to benefit from it makes it an ideal resource to provide in an open-access manner (Verschraegen/Schiltz 2006). The best contemporary examples of this are the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg, which can be understood as an open-access information or knowledge commons (Safner 2016).

The philosopher Peter Suber defines open access in the following manner:

- Open access (OA) is free online access. OA literature is not only free of charge to everyone with an Internet connection, but free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. OA literature is barrier-free literature produced by removing the price barriers and permission barriers that block access and limit usage of most conventionally published literature, whether in print or online. (Suber 2007: 171)

If we thus understand open access information in this manner, what would differentiate its organization as a public good from a commons?

According to Suber, one main difference lies in the author’s rights. When work is put in the public domain, no rights are retained: there are authors, but no legal owners of the text.

In contrast, a commons is constituted when the author consents to all legitimate scholarly uses. The author thereby voluntarily gives up certain rights (which they also do when publishing in private journals), but retains the right to block the distribution of falsified or misattributed copies and block the commercial reuse of such copies (ibid.: 171, 179). From this perspective, the intellectual commons is possibly more attractive for authors because they remain the owners of the text, while still being able to provide the information to a wider public.

Aside from the question of the ownership of texts, public provision of open-access information differs from commons provision with respect to ownership and management of its infrastructure. One form of public provision of access to scientific information would require the state to set up and manage open-access internet platforms for the general public. This is often done with in-house government research that is funded by taxpayers. It is questionable, however, whether governments should also do this for academic journals. If we look at other OA projects, Project Gutenberg is, for example, a private non-profit corporation that is financed through donations and managed by its CEO and Board of Directors. Wikipedia, also a non-profit organization funded by donations, is administered by a sevenmember board of trustees. For academic journals, it is evident that the academic community itself ought to provide and manage the infrastructure for open access to scientific information. Managing boards can also include members of public libraries and the wider public in order to ensure relevance and accessibility of the information. The existing expenses could be covered by public funds (e.g. in the form of salaries of university and library employees), publication grants and donations.

Importantly, open access implies free access to information, which means that there would be no subscription fees – for readers or libraries. Yet, because much of this publishing work is already done for free by academics, we can assume that the remaining costs will be rather low. But as Suber says, “there is not just one way to cover the expenses of a peer-reviewed OA journal” (ibid.: 174). While the contents, in all of these cases, are provided for in an open-access manner, the management is conducted either through government officials, entrepreneurs, civil society or professional societies. While all this information should be understood as an information commons, I would argue that open access created through peer production and managed by those largely responsible for and affected by this content should, more generally, be considered commons in their institutional sense. In relation to our four examples, it appears that Wikipedia and open access scientific journals would come closest to this notion of a commons.

Lastly, however, it must be noted that from the perspective of access to educational resources, the value of open access to information stands above its organizational provision. The question of how this intellectual resource should be managed is therefore secondary. Despite the risks of tragedy inherent in creating intellectual commons (Wenzler 2017; Suber 2007: 183-7),the advantages of a commons over public provision are also based on the innovation that results from the inclusion of citizens in research, also known as public science or participatory action research (Kindon et al. 2007; Lawson et al. 2015). In this sense, an information commons can ideally decrease the knowledge gap between scientific experts and the wider population, not simply by educating the public but also by providing people with the means to participate in and use science for the democratic co-creation of their shared, common reality."

(https://www.transcript-verlag.de/shopMedia/openaccess/pdf/oa9783839454244.pdf)

SOURCE:

* Chapter/ Article: The Role of the State in a Commons-Creating Society. In: Chapter 7 in Democracy, Markets and the Commons. By Lukas Peter.

URL = https://www.transcript-verlag.de/shopMedia/openaccess/pdf/oa9783839454244.pdf