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Sustaining Scholarly Infrastructures through Collective Action: The lessons that Olson can teach us
This document discusses challenges in sustaining scholarly infrastructures as collective goods and lessons that can be learned from economist Olson's work. It notes that large groups have difficulty provisioning collective goods without special cases like oligopoly control, non-collective side benefits, or compulsory funding. Crossref is used as an example that transitioned through these phases over time. Membership models are less applicable for open data and if taxation models are needed, organizations will require community trust.
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Sustaining Scholarly Infrastructures through Collective Action: The lessons that Olson can teach us
- 1. Sustaining Scholarly Infrastructures ThroughCollective Action The Lessons that Olson Can Teach Us @cameronneylon http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0068-716X
- 2. To read thepaper search for biorxiv neylon olson
- 4. • 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 • Oligopoly • Non-collective goods as a side effect • Compulsory funding (taxation)
- 5. Ways of beatingthe problem… 1. 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 certificationis an example) or top slicing/overheads models
- 6. Crossref phased throughall three approaches Crossref provides a public good in the form of freely accessible bibliographic metadata and the infrastructure that supports it. Three phases 1. Effective oligopoly: 5-7 publishers dominate the space and were essentially able to act unilaterally to set up and support Crossref 2. Non-collective side benefit: Members join to be able to assign DOIs and to gain the benefits of traffic through the referrer 3. 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.
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- 12. No taxation withoutrepresentation
- 13. • Broad coverage •Stakeholder governed • Non-discriminatory • Transparent operations • Cannot lobby • Living will • Incentivesto wind down • Time-limitedfunds only for time-limiteduses • 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 Communityinsurance Bilder G, Lin J, Neylon C 2015 Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure-v1, Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1314859
- 14. 1. Membership modelsare much less applicable as a transitional model than we would like (especially for open data) 2. If we accept a need to move to taxation models then organisations will need to be trusted by community
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