---
title: "Economics of open science"
chunk: 7/15
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_open_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:49:05.253185+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

==== The emergence of digital knowledge commons ====
Until the 1990s open knowledge was not considered as a commons in economic theory but as a "classic example of a pure public good, a good available to all and where one person's use does not subtract from another's use". For Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess, this framework is no longer viable as the principle of non-excludability has been significantly weakened: "new technologies can enable the capture of what were once free and open public goods (...) Knowledge, which can seem so ubiquitous in digital form, is, in reality, more vulnerable than ever before" In a scientific context, examples of new enclosures of public goods may include all the surveillance data systems put in place by Elsevier, Springer or Academic social networks that capturate activities such as social interactions, reference collections. The uncontrolled development of the early web highlighted the need for common management of knowledge resources: "People started to notice behaviors and conditions on the web — congestion, free riding, conflict, overuse, and pollution — that had long been identified with other types of commons."
The open access of the 1990s and early 2000s movement aimed to ensure that science will be a public good, freely usable to all. The unlimited potential circulation of online content has transformed historical forms of non-commercial open access as a commons, at least from a reader's point of view: "By definition, OA literature excludes no one, or at least no one with an Internet connection. By contrast, non-OA electronic journals try very hard to exclude nonsubscribers from reading the articles".
While "knowledge commons is not synonymous with open access", the process of making open access a reality has also incidentally created a global "community network of the open-access movement": decisions had to be made regarding a commonly accepted definition of open access, free licenses and potential exclusions of non-open access initiatives that are embodied in the Budapest Open Access Initiative.
The early open science infrastructures aimed to ensure the circulation of scientific publications as a common good. Archives or institutional repositories were conceived as local or global community services. In August 1991, Paul Ginsbarg created the first inception of the arXiv project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in answer to recurring storage issue of academic mailboxes on account of the increasing sharing of scientific articles. Repositories embody numerous characteristics of common resources under the definition of Elinor Ostrom: they maintain and protect a scientific resources, they implement weak requirements for membership (submissions are not peer-reviewed) and they prime coordination and shared management over competition. By the early 2000s, numerous repositories strived to "comply with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) of 1999, which ensures the interoperability of different repositories for the purpose of locating their contents".

==== Enclosures of open science commons ====
Archive repositories and other forms of open science infrastructures have been originally individual initiatives. As such, their status as a scientific commons were not always institutionalized and they were hardly protected against potential privatizations: "one recent strategy of traditional commercial journal publishers to avoid negative externalities from green OA is to acquire successful OA repositories". The acquisition of Digital Commons and SSRN by Elsevier has highlighted the lack of reliability of critical scientific infrastructure for open science, which creates the conditions of a tragedy of the commons. The SPARC report on European Infrastructures underlines that "a number of important infrastructures at risk and as a consequence, the products and services that comprise open infrastructure are increasingly being tempted by buyout offers from large commercial enterprises. This threat affects both not-for-profit open infrastructure as well as closed, and is evidenced by the buyout in recent years of commonly relied on tools and platforms such as SSRN, bepress, Mendeley, and GitHub." Weak definitions of scientific commons, and of the requirements and expectations of commons governance, may have facilitated this take-over: "many self-described 'commons' projects for open access publishing simply restate the values of commercial publishing (...) while relying on the language of a more progressive politics."
In contrast with the consolidation of privately owned infrastructure, the open science movement "has tended to overlook the importance of social structures and systemic constraints in the design of new forms of knowledge infrastructures." It remained mostly focused to the content of scientific research, with little integration of technical tools and few large community initiatives. "common pool of resources is not governed or managed by the current scholarly commons initiative. There is no dedicated hard infrastructure and though there may be a nascent community, there is no formal membership." In 2015, the Principles for open science infrastructures underlined the discrepancy between the increasing openness of scientific publications or datasets and the closeness of the infrastructure that control their circulation.

Over the past decade, we have made real progress to further ensure the availability of data that supports research claims. This work is far from complete. We believe that data about the research process itself deserves exactly the same level of respect and care. The scholarly community does not own or control most of this information. For example, we could have built or taken on the infrastructure to collect bibliographic data and citations but that task was left to private enterprise.
The fragility of open science commons until the 2010s contrasts with the dynamics of contributive projects beyond the scope of research and scientific activities. Wikipedia, Open Street Map or Wikidata are open communities with a low threshold of admission and membership that will come to tipify the online knowledge commons. Their management is analogous to natural common-pool resource system, where local uses and participation are rarely discriminated a priori, although repeated abuses can lead to exclusion.