The term "knowledge commons" refers to information, data, and content that is collectively owned and managed by a community of users, particularly over the Internet. What distinguishes a knowledge commons from a
commons
The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly. Commons c ...
of shared physical resources is that digital resources are
non-subtractible; that is, multiple users can access the same digital resources with no effect on their quantity or quality.
Conceptual background
The term 'commons' is derived from the medieval economic system ''
the commons
The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly. Commons c ...
''. The knowledge commons is a model for a number of domains, including
Open Educational Resources
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and ...
such as the MIT
OpenCourseWare
OpenCourseWare (OCW) are course lessons created at universities and published for free via the Internet. OCW projects first appeared in the late 1990s, and after gaining traction in Europe and then the United States have become a worldwide means ...
, free digital media such as Wikipedia,
Creative Commons–licensed art, open-source research, and open scientific collections such as the
Public Library of Science
PLOS (for Public Library of Science; PLoS until 2012 ) is a nonprofit publisher of open-access journals in science, technology, and medicine and other scientific literature, under an open-content license. It was founded in 2000 and laun ...
or the
Science Commons
Science Commons (SC) was a Creative Commons project for designing strategies and tools for faster, more efficient web-enabled scientific research. The organization's goals were to identify unnecessary barriers to research, craft policy guidelin ...
,
free software
Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...
and
Open Design
The open-design movement involves the development of physical products, machines and systems through use of publicly shared design information. This includes the making of both free and open-source software (FOSS) as well as open-source hardwar ...
. According to research by Charlotte Hess and
Elinor Ostrom
Elinor Claire "Lin" Ostrom (née Awan; August 7, 1933 – June 12, 2012) was an American political scientist and political economist whose work was associated with New Institutional Economics and the resurgence of political economy. In 2009, ...
,
the conceptual background of the knowledge commons encompasses two intellectual histories: first, a European tradition of battling the enclosure of the "intangible commons of the mind", threatened by expanding intellectual property rights and privatization of knowledge. Second, a tradition rooted in the United States, which sees the knowledge commons as a shared space allowing for free speech and democratic practices, and which is in the tradition of the town commons movement and commons-based production of scholarly work,
open science, open libraries, and collective action.
The production of works in the knowledge commons is often driven by
collective intelligence respectively the wisdom of crowds and is related to knowledge communism as it was defined by
Robert K. Merton
Robert King Merton (born Meyer Robert Schkolnick; July 4, 1910 – February 23, 2003) was an American sociologist who is considered a founding father of modern sociology, and a major contributor to the subfield of criminology. He served as th ...
, according to whom scientists give up
intellectual property rights
Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, cop ...
in exchange for recognition and esteem.
Ferenc Gyuris argues, that it is important to distinguish "information" from "knowledge" in defining the term "knowledge commons". He argues that "knowledge as a shared resource" requires that both information must become accessible and potential recipients must become able and willing to internalize it as 'knowledge'. ''"Therefore, knowledge cannot become a shared resource without a complex set of institutions and practices that give the opportunity to potential recipients to gain the necessary abilities and willingness"''.
Copyleft
Copyleft
Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, ''freedoms'' refers to the use of the work for any purpose ...
licenses are institutions which support a knowledge commons of executable software. Copyleft licenses grant licensees all necessary rights such as right to study, use, change and redistribute—under the condition that all future works building on the license are again kept in the commons. Popular applications of the 'copyleft' principle are the
GNU
GNU () is an extensive collection of free software (383 packages as of January 2022), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operat ...
Software Licenses (
GPL
The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general u ...
,
LGPL and
GFDL
The GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the ...
by
Free Software Foundation
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded by Richard Stallman on October 4, 1985, to support the free software movement, with the organization's preference for software being distributed under copyleft (" ...
) and the
share-alike
Share-alike (🄎) is a copyright licensing term, originally used by the Creative Commons project, to describe works or licenses that require copies or adaptations of the work to be released under the same or similar license as the original. Cop ...
licenses under
creative commons.
See also
*
Commons
The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth. These resources are held in common even when owned privately or publicly. Commons c ...
*
Commons-based peer production
Commons-based peer production (CBPP) is a term coined by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler. It describes a model of socio-economic production in which large numbers of people work cooperatively; usually over the Internet. Commons-based ...
*
Digital commons (economics)
The digital commons are a form of commons involving the distribution and communal ownership of informational resources and technology. Resources are typically designed to be used by the community by which they are created.
Examples of the digital ...
*
Information commons
*
Noogenesis
The noosphere (alternate spelling noösphere) is a philosophical concept developed and popularized by the Russian-Ukrainian Soviet biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky, and the French philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Vernad ...
*
Open content
*
Open Knowledge Foundation
Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) is a global, non-profit network that promotes and shares information at no charge, including both content and data. It was founded by Rufus Pollock on 20 May 2004 in Cambridge, UK. It is incorporated in England a ...
*
Open source
*
Open source appropriate technology
Open-source appropriate technology (OSAT) is appropriate technology developed through the principles of the open-design movement. Appropriate technology is technology designed with special consideration to the environmental, ethical, cultural, soc ...
*
Open-design movement
*
OpenCourseWare
OpenCourseWare (OCW) are course lessons created at universities and published for free via the Internet. OCW projects first appeared in the late 1990s, and after gaining traction in Europe and then the United States have become a worldwide means ...
*
Public ownership
State ownership, also called government ownership and public ownership, is the ownership of an industry, asset, or enterprise by the state or a public body representing a community, as opposed to an individual or private party. Public ownershi ...
*
Robert K. Merton
Robert King Merton (born Meyer Robert Schkolnick; July 4, 1910 – February 23, 2003) was an American sociologist who is considered a founding father of modern sociology, and a major contributor to the subfield of criminology. He served as th ...
Notes
External links
*
*
*
*
First Thematic Conference on the Knowledge Commonsheld in 2012 on the theme of "Governing Pooled Knowledge Resources: Building Institutions for Sustainable Scientific, Cultural and Genetic Resource Commons"
Free/Libre Open Knowledge Society, designing a world for the commons. A Free, Libre, Open Knowledge society is about to be built in Ecuador.
* ''Governing Knowledge Commons''. 2014. Edited by Brett Frischmann, Mike Madison, and Katherine Strandburg. Oxford University Press.
*
Tragedy revisited by Robert Boyd, Peter J. Richerson, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, Tine De Moor, Matthew O. Jackson, Kristina M. Gjerde, Harriet Harden-Davies, Brett M. Frischmann, Michael J. Madison, Katherine J. Strandburg, Angela R McLean, Christopher Dye. ''Science'', 14 Dec 2018, 362:6420, pp. 1236-1241. DOI: 10.1126/science.aaw0911
How to Reap the Benefits of the “Digital Revolution”? Modularity and the Commons 2019. By Vasilis Kostakis, published in ''Halduskultuur: The Estonian Journal of Administrative Culture and Digital Governance'', Vol 20(1):4–19.
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