The Digital Commons

Jason M. Kelly PhD FSA Director, IUPUI Arts & Humanities Institute Associate Professor of British History, IUPUI jaskelly@iupui.edu | @jason_m_kelly

John Constable. Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead Heath. ca. 1820. Oil on canvas. 54 x 76.9 cm. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

“Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an

arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and

beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal

of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain.”

Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162, no. 3859 (December 1968): 1243-48

John Constable. Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead Heath. ca. 1820. Oil on canvas. 54 x 76.9 cm. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

“Although tragedies have undoubtedly occurred, it is also obvious that for thousands of years people have self-organized to manage common-

pool resources, and users often do devise long-term, sustainable institutions for governing these resources.”

Elinor Ostrom, et al., “Revisiting the Commons,” Science 284, no. 5412 (April 1999): 278-82

What are the Digital Commons?

Writing Studies Tree, http://writingstudiestree.org/network,accessed 6 March 2014

The Digital Commons are those spaces, principles, and practices that allow the free exchange of knowledge in the

digital environment.

This free exchange of information is often referred to as open access. However, the term open access often elides the

complex material and cultural infrastructures that both create and maintain the digital commons.

A Short History of Open Access and the Digital Commons

Richard Cumberland uses the term “open access” to refer to

access to information through

the press

1787“Open Access” to stacks debated at the meeting of the American Library

Association

1899

1900

As part of the anti-copyright

movement, Tolstoy supports a publisher who printed his work

with “no rights reserved”

The Open Source begins with the GNU

Manifesto

1983

2001

Budapest Open Access Initiative

2003Bethseda Statement

on Open Access Publishing and

Berlin Declaration

Johann Peter Hasenclever. Das Lesekabinett (The Reading Room). 1843. 71 x 100 cm. Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

“The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon

claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general

rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.”

Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1989), 27

William Hogarth, “An Election Entertainment” from The Humours of an Election series, 1755. Sir John Soane Museum, London

Adapted from Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, “Introduction: An Overview of the Knowledge Commons“ in Understanding Knowledge as a Commons, ed. Hess and Ostrom (MIT Press, 2006), 3-18.

Subtractability

Low High

Exclusion

Difficult Public Goods (knowledge)

Common Pool Resources (libraries)

EasyClub Goods

(journal subscriptions)

Private Goods (personal computers)

AdditiveStatic

Open Access

Walled Access

Governance

Ownership Regime

Economy

Social NetworksSociocultural Structures

OpenKnowledge

Material Infrastructure

The Ecology of the Knowledge Commons

Resources Additive Resources

Static Resources

Open Access

Walled Access

OA Repositories OA Journals

Blogs

Online Reference Collections

Online Journals

OA Reference Collections

Access and the Digital Commons