Policies to Promote Public Knowledge Goods and Knowledge Commons
* Article: AN INTEROPERABILITY PRINCIPLE FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND GOVERNANCE: THE ROLE OF EMERGING INSTITUTIONS. By John Wilbanks and Carolina Rossini.
This is a working paper, part of the research conducted under the Industrial Cooperation Project at the Berkman Center at Harvard.
Description
By John Wilbanks and Carolina Rossini:
"This study examines the relationships among funders, research institutions, and the "units" of knowledge creation and local knowledge governance, which are hosted inside research institutions. Our goal is to uncover the knowledge spaces where commons-based approaches, peer production, and modes of network-mediated innovation have - and have not - emerged, and to examine the conditions under which these approaches either flourish or are discouraged. Our rationale is that the emergence of novel, democratized, and distributed knowledge governance represent a meaningful complement to more traditional systems, with the potential to create new public knowledge goods accessible to a global civil society and spur innovation in previously unforeseen ways.
The first section of this paper is an introduction to distributed knowledge creation and open systems for knowledge transactions (including but not limited to copyrighted and patented knowledge-embedded4 products).
The second section contains a case study of the complex and interlocking system of relationships governing knowledge-embedded products in the field of genomics, as well as some experimental interventions to adjust these relationships with the goal of maximizing either the total knowledge output or the value captured from the knowledge products. Although we have focused our case study on genomics, which offers a rich set of varied knowledge products and cases for study, the rationale we present in this discussion paper is also applicable to a variety of areas, from educational resources to alternative energy related technology.
The third section examines in particular the role of national innovation policy and the specific relationships that research institutions have with public policy and governmental funders, including the role of government and policy mandates (either towards enclosure or openness) as regards knowledge-embedded products. We have chosen to focus on the role of universities because their upstream role in the innovation ecosystem can influence downstream governance of knowledge through creation of cooperation arrangements, the strategic retention of rights, and/or publication and distribution of knowledge products.
Finally, we make a series of provisional recommendations for policymakers, funders, and research institution leadership that might decrease transaction costs for knowledge products, increase the incentive for collaborative knowledge production and reuse, and increase the odds of novel methods of knowledge creation, distribution and transfer emerging from an increasingly connected world."
Excerpts
Why is distributed innovation not taken up in academia?
By John Wilbanks and Carolina Rossini:
"Why then has distributed innovation in knowledge creation not taken root in academics the way it has in encyclopedias and software? One key reason is the lingering effect of the technology of paper in which academic scholarship developed. 22The print culture is embedded deeply into the academy and represents a major blocking agent to the adoption of distributed innovation. Rewards, incentives, and metrics for academic professionals are deeply tied to print based metrics like citations, references, and impact factors. The existing systems of knowledge governance and credit allocation are not well aligned with a distributed knowledge creation environment, and the kind of authority rewarded in academia (typically resulting from award of advanced degrees) is not always the same kind of authority rewarded in a distributed knowledge system.
An institution or group of institutions wanting to enable true distributed knowledge governance would face a socio-technical set of challenges to implementation, from the difficulty of rewarding participation in peer production of knowledge, the difficulty of defining knowledge into forms that work on wikis and other new modes of knowledge creation and distribution, on the complexity of curating data and databases, and on the limitations of library capability in the long-term storage and preservation of data – to name but a few.
There is a key lesson for educational institutions aiming for distributed knowledge creation to draw from the technical world: the idea of interoperability. Interoperability allows unrelated systems to communicate and function in ways unexpected by their designers. The idea of interoperability as something that scales from technology to knowledge itself has emerged alongside the rise of the digital commons in culture and software. In this view, it is not only computer networks that must interoperate, but intellectual property rights and semantic understanding, so that distributed peer production of knowledge can make the leap from an encyclopedia into the sciences and other research disciplines." (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/commonsbasedresearch/sites/commonsbasedresearch/images/Genomics_Knowledge_Governance.pdf)
Conclusion
By John Wilbanks and Carolina Rossini:
"The world of knowledge creation, distribution and governance sits at a crossroads, where the potential of new network driven systems hits the reality of traditional institutionally mediated knowledge governance. This is particularly the case in areas, such as science, that require more infrastructure and tools than are available from the consumer and commercial internet.
Infrastructure brings institutions to the table, and institutions bring many traditional roles of knowledge governance into the conversation, which interact uneasily at best with the network systems and cultures.
There are few, if any, “easy answers” to the questions of what an institution, a government, a funder, or an individual should do in the short term. But there are early lessons to draw from the successes in knowledge access, formation and distribution outside the traditional system that provide clues.
First, the principle of interoperability should not be confined to technology, but instead should inform decisions ranging from policy to intellectual property to institutional arrangements and forward. Legal implications can reach through software to touch technology, content, knowledge products, and more - and interoperability as a design principle represents “good taste” in knowledge governance, as it both empowers those with the current capacity to participate in innovation and those who have not yet acquired that capacity. Practicing this principle of interoperability and separation of concerns means that we do not merely create infrastructure that serves today’s knowledge problem, but that can be extended and built upon to serve many knowledge problems in the future, most of which we cannot yet see. The leading expression to be here followed is design it so it can attain interoperability.
Second, the role of democratized access to infrastructure is essential. Open systems, be they legal, technical, or policy, that are not designed with interoperable infrastructure in mind are likely to yield unintended consequences. We saw this in the case study with the HapMap license, which blocked database integration as a side-effect of attempting to enforce patent openness. By violating the separation of concerns, an open knowledge governance attempt in patents resulted in a non-interoperable governance reality in data. Thus, policy and governance should not only tend towards open infrastructure, but contemplate the “environmental impact” of specific decisions on the availability of infrastructure." (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/commonsbasedresearch/sites/commonsbasedresearch/images/Genomics_Knowledge_Governance.pdf)
More Information
These concepts are discussed in the text: