One of our most valuable commons are universities: a special non-market system for generating reliable and valuable knowledge. This is precisely why so many businesses are trying to privatize the academic commons....
These were among the topics discussed at an Ottawa conference that I attended over the weekend. “Controlling Intellectual Property: The Academic Community and the Future of Knowledge,” was hosted by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT)....I gave the closing keynote on “The Perils of Property Speak in Academia,” which I will post as an essay on OntheCommons.org next week.
I was struck by the active enthusiasm of university administrators to convert academia into a more market-friendly environment....
The human genome would have gotten locked up as private property if public-sector researchers had not raced ahead and published the data first, putting it into the public domain.
As more parties win patents for “upstream” basic research, the “anti-commons” effect kicks in. This is what happens when property rights for a given field of research are so numerous and fragmented that it becomes too difficult and costly to clear the rights for one's research. This is one reason that the search for a malaria vaccine has been so elusive – there are 34 “patent families” for a single malarial antigen.
What kinds of future knowledge are we sabotaging right now? As I told the conference, if contemporary copyright and patent rules had been in effect in the 1950s and 1960s, it’s likely that neither the biotech revolution nor the computer revolution would have occurred. Too much fundamental knowledge would have been proprietary.
There are two related forces propelling the corporate enclosure of academia....[G]overnment has chronically under-funded higher education and research. This has sent administrators scurrying to find new sources of funding....New market-oriented rules are imposed: Publication has to be delayed lest it make the research unpatentable. Commercially hot research takes priority over long-term inquiry. New ethical conflicts-of-interest arise as researchers serve two masters – the corporate sponsor and their academic peers.
One way that academia can begin to fight back, I believe, is by developing a stronger, more coherent analysis for why its open sharing and collaboration represent a “value proposition.” The academic commons is at least as generative as the market, but you rarely hear that stated or explained. Until it is, administrators and even many professors are likely to see more value in cold, hard cash than in the norms and ethics of the academic commons.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/02/2006 01:37:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
