Economics Nobel goes to commons research
Gavin Baker,
Open Access News,
Oct 14, 2009
I'm loving the recent selection in the Nobel prizes. No, not that one, this one: the Nobel Prize for Economics, for research into the in formation commons. How good is it? It's an explicit recognition that "Information that used to be 'free' is now increasingly being privatized, monitored, encrypted, and restricted... Multiple forces are vying for capture and restriction of traditionally available knowledge." And it looks at the governance of this resource as a commons. The dominant "tragedy of the commons" is a special case, they argue, and a wider understanding of the commons reveals different types of goods, which are best managed differently. This sort of management is exemplified by projects such as the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). "Their multiple goals include not only sustaining the resource (the intellectual public domain) but building equity of information access and provision, and creating more efficient methods of dissemination through informal, shared protocols, standards, and rules among the local and global scholarly community."
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