Affiliations: Director, International S&T Information Programmes, The National Academies 500 5th Street NW, Washington, DC 20001 USA
Note: [1] The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the National Academies. A more comprehensive version of this article, tentatively entitled New Models of Information Production and Management in Public Research: Legal, Economic and Science Policy Considerations, will be published by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) later this year.
Abstract: Public research is largely an open, communitarian, and cooperative system. It is founded on freedom of inquiry, sharing of data, and full disclosure of results by scientists whose motivations are rooted primarily in intellectual curiosity, the desire to influence the thinking of others about the natural world, peer recognition for their achievements, and promotion of the public interest. Although this normative and value structure of public science predated the revolution in digitally networked technologies, it makes it ideally suited to experiment with and exploit those new technological capabilities, which themselves facilitate open, distributed, and cooperative uses of information. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the emergence and early institutionalization of many new paradigms of virtual knowledge-based communities and related information activities have occurred in public science. Examples include open journals, open archives, federated data management networks, community-based open peer review, collaboratories for virtual experiments, and virtual observatories, among others. Taken together, these emerging capabilities represent aspects of a broader trend toward both formal and informal peer production of information in a highly distributed, volunteer, and open environment. Such activities are based on principles that may be more accurately characterized as intellectual commons, rather than intellectual property, and that reflect the communitarian ethos of the republic of science. This presentation will describe several new models of information production, management, and dissemination in public science, and analyze some of the key factors and conditions for their success.
