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