Semicommon Property Rights and Scattering in the Open Fields

Smith, Henry E.

doi:10.1086/468066

Cited by 112 publications

(54 citation statements)

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“…Our article seeks to problematise binaries of knowledge possession and dispossession by examining the relationship of the "semicommons" (Smith 2000) to academic publishing. Our interest in this term is based on the recognition that a political economy strongly underpins how academic publishing is formed, as is evident from a variety of international and country perspectives (Merrett 2006;Biesta 2012;Lincoln 2012).…”

Section: Background: the Academic Publishing Semicommonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Academic Publishing and its Digital Binds: Beyond the Paywall towards Ethical Executions of Code

Swist

Magee

2018

Cult. Unbound

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In this article we explore various constraints and potentials of academic publishing in the digital age. Advancement of digital platforms and their expansive reach amplify the underlying tensions of institutional and scholarly change. A key affordance of these platforms is that of speed: rapidly distributing the outputs of a precaritised profession and responding to pressures to publish as well as the profit motive of publishers. On the one hand, these systems make possible alternative modes of contributory content and peer-production for supporting the commons. On the other, they turn all too readily into privatising devices for contracting labour and profit in the corporate sector and, within the academy, for accentuating subtle power effects. Drawing upon platform studies and integrating insights from political philosophy and property law, our article seeks to problematise neat binaries of possession and dispossession associated with the sector. We examine in particular how co-existing and emergent socio-technical circuits-what we term digital binds-modulate the political economy of academic publishing on a number of scales. These entangled binds constrain but also indicate mechanisms for opening up new possibilities. We introduce three ethical executions of code towards this end: dissuading, detouring, and disrupting. Together, these mechanisms show how mutually beneficial boundaries can be drawn for designing otherwise: by blocking dominant systems and bargaining for fairer practices; exploring sanctioned and unsanctioned systems which offer more diverse publishing pathways; and, disrupting systemic processes and profits towards more inclusive and equitable conditions.

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Section: Background: the Academic Publishing Semicommonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Academic Publishing and its Digital Binds: Beyond the Paywall towards Ethical Executions of Code

Swist

Magee

2018

Cult. Unbound

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“…The information environment is riddled with complex combinations of private intellectual property rights, contracts, and social norms that are partly open and partly closed, usable by members and sometimes by the public at large, though not always on a purely "free" basis. Examples of these knowledge commons-sometimes called "semicommons" (Smith 2000)-include such diverse institutions as public lending libraries, research universities, trade and craft organizations, and repositories of biological information. Default rules of intellectual property may be combined with licenses and contracts, with social norms and with cultural and other institutional forms to construct these knowledge commons, which depend on-but are built alongside and on top of-basic forms of knowledge and culture.…”

Section: B the Need For Systematic Empirical Study Of Knowledge Commonsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Governing Knowledge Commons -- Introduction & Chapter 1

Madison¹,

Frischmann²,

Strandburg³

2017

Preprint

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“Knowledge commons” describes the institutionalized community governance of the sharing and, in some cases, creation, of information, science, knowledge, data, and other types of intellectual and cultural resources. It is the subject of enormous recent interest and enthusiasm with respect to policymaking about innovation, creative production, and intellectual property. Taking that enthusiasm as its starting point, Governing Knowledge Commons argues that policymaking should be based on evidence and a deeper understanding of what makes commons institutions work. It offers a systematic way to study knowledge commons, borrowing and building on Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize-winning research on natural resource commons. It proposes a framework for studying knowledge commons that is adapted to the unique attributes of knowledge and information, describing the framework in detail and explaining how to put it into context both with respect to commons research and with respect to innovation and information policy. Eleven detailed case studies apply and discuss the framework exploring knowledge commons across a wide variety of scientific and cultural domains.

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“…Smith, who was still in graduate school (linguistics) and not yet in law school when GC was published, has now taken his place as one of the legal academy's most profound and productive property scholars. In this early piece, Smith described a semicommons as a kind of property that is in part individually managed and in part held in common with others, and in which these divergent management practices interact to enhance value (Smith 2000). In a certain sense, to be sure, much ordinary modern property can be understood in this way; e.g.…”

Section: Gc and Legal Property Theorymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One model is the Australian tuna fishery, where the recipients of tradable fishing rights have joined forces to protect and feed the tuna, and to manage the surrounding ecosystem for the healthful growth of the tuna (Rose 1999). As in the property theory literature, those efforts effectively combine modernist property rights with self-generated common management practices -a kind of semicommons, as Henry Smith would call it (Smith 2000). As such, they could offer an alternative vision of common ecosystem management, one that starts with strong but partial property rights, and then relies on the rights-holders to create their own common management regimes.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Ostrom and the lawyers: The impact of Governing the Commons on the American legal academy

Rose

2011

Int J Commons

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American legal academics began to cite Elinor Ostrom's Governing the Commons (GC) shortly after its 1990 publication, with citations peaking in the mid-2000s and with signs of a new peak in 2010 in the wake of Ostrom's Nobel Prize in Economics. The legal scholars most interested in GC have worked in three areas: general property theory, environmental and natural resource law, and since the mid-1990s, intellectual property. In all those areas legal scholars have found GC and its many examples a strong source of support for the proposition that people can cooperate to overcome common pool resource issues, managing resources through informal norms rather than either individual property or coercive government. Legal academics have also been at least mildly critical of GC, however. A number have tried to balance the attractive features of GC's governance model -stability and sustainability -with more standard legal models favoring toward open markets, fluid change and egalitarianism.

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Semicommon Property Rights and Scattering in the Open Fields

Cited by 112 publications

References 0 publications

Academic Publishing and its Digital Binds: Beyond the Paywall towards Ethical Executions of Code

Academic Publishing and its Digital Binds: Beyond the Paywall towards Ethical Executions of Code

Governing Knowledge Commons -- Introduction & Chapter 1

Ostrom and the lawyers: The impact of Governing the Commons on the American legal academy

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Semicommon Property Rights and Scattering in the Open Fields

Cited by 112 publications

References 0 publications

Academic Publishing and its Digital Binds: Beyond the Paywall towards Ethical Executions of Code

Academic Publishing and its Digital Binds: Beyond the Paywall towards Ethical Executions of Code

Governing Knowledge Commons -- Introduction &amp; Chapter 1

Ostrom and the lawyers: The impact of Governing the Commons on the American legal academy

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Product

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Governing Knowledge Commons -- Introduction & Chapter 1