sustainable futures for research communication
TRANSCRIPT
Sustainable Futures for Research Communication
The Political Economics of Scholarly Publishing
@cameronneylonhttp://orcid.org/0000-0002-0068-716X
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To read the paper search for site:cameronneylon.net goods scholarly marketplace
Most of what we say about sustainability is nonsense
A lot of what we ask people to do for sustainability will never work
He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Thomas Jefferson
Groups make knowledge…
…knowledge is a club good
How do we sustain public-making?
• Collective (Public-Like) Goods are difficult for large groups to provision• Small groups can work together• Large groups will fail except under
specific circumstances
How do we sustain public-making?
How do we sustain the club?
Institutionalizing the scholar
Institutions are the the prescriptions that humans use to organize all forms of repetitive and structured interactions
Ostrom – Governing the Commons
Hartley and Potts – Cultural Science
Culture [and institutions] make groups.
Groups make knowledge.
The publishing systems is a collective good
One purpose of universities is to force professional scholars to publish
Institutionalizing the publisher
http://doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2016.0026
A journal is a club
Potts et al – SSRN
Club size is limited by friction in access to the club good
Potts et al – SSRN
Journal Club Knowledge Club
Journal Club Knowledge Club
Journal Club Knowledge Club
https://www.flickr.com/photos/pedrosimoes7/7018543323Pedro Ribeiro SimõesCC BY
A brief data interlude…
• Collective (Public-Like) Goods are difficult for large groups to provision• Small groups can work together• Large groups can only succeed by
applying one of three special cases• Compulsory funding (taxation)•Non-collective goods as a side
effect•Oligopoly
Crossref phased through all three modelsCrossref provides a public good in the form of freely accessible bibliographic metadata and the infrastructure that supports it.Three phases1. Effective oligopoly: 5-7 publishers dominate the space and were
essentially able to act unilaterally to set up and support Crossref2. Non-collective side benefit: Members join to be able to assign
DOIs and to gain the benefits of traffic through the referrer3. Compulsory contribution: No (STM) publisher will be taken
seriously unless it is assigning Crossref DOIs. Membership is (close to) effectively compulsory for a serious publisher.
Implementation Models1. Oligopoly: Generally of funders or publishers, there are too many
institutions. EuropePMC is an example.2. Non-collective side-product: Needs to be a natural service or non-
collective good generated as part of public good provisioning. Very few good examples in open data world and this is predictable, failure often results in a turn to a subscription model eg TAIR
3. Compulsion: Either compulsory membership models (professional certification is an example) or top slicing/overheads models
What about the library…?
What way forward?
1. Control over capital (the Marxist revolution)
2. Focus on community building
3. Support collective models
4. Define service requirements
5. Build infrastructures
No taxation without representation
• Broad coverage• Stakeholder governed• Non-discriminatory• Transparent operations• Cannot lobby• Living will• Incentives to wind down
• Time-limited funds only for time-limited uses
• Generate a surplus• Contingency fund• Revenue from services• Mission consistent
• Can be “forked”• Open Source• Open Data• Available Data• Patent non-assertion
Governance Financial sustainability Community insurance
Bilder G, Lin J, Neylon C 2015 Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure-v1, Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1314859
Prestige = Price
Build sustainable communities in an environment where public-making
is good for those communities
@cameronneylonhttp://orcid.org/0000-0002-0068-716X
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/CameronNeylon/sustainable-futures-for-research-communication