Browsing by Author "Hess, Charlotte"

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Artifacts, Facilities, and Content: Information as a Common-Pool Resource
(2001) Hess, Charlotte; Ostrom, Elinor
The recent competition for ownership of the intellectual public domain is a direct outcome of new technologies and global markets. Distributed digital technologies have the dual capacity to increase as well as restrict access to information. These technologies have brought a larger number of the people of this earth greater access to important information about history, science, art, literature, and current events in specific places. At the same time, however, these new technologies enable profit-oriented firms the capability of extracting resources previously held in common for their value and for establishing property rights. Multiple forces are vying for capture and restriction of traditionally available knowledge: corporations vs. indigenous peoples (Monsanto owning the patent on the genetic structure of the neem); federal and state governments vs. citizens (encryption and digital surveillance vs. privacy); universities vs. professors (institutional vs. individual intellectual property rights); publishers vs. libraries (ephemeralization of library collections through licensing, bundling, and withdrawal of information). This competition for ownership of previously shared resources is not unique to the public domain of knowledge. Given the opening of vast markets for commodities of all kinds, many natural as well as human-made resources are under pressure. The world?s fisheries are fighting depletion because of the capture capabilities of larger trawlers, wider and finer nets, and larger fleets. Indigenous forest systems are being privatized, with the forests being burnt or logged at alarming rates, not only rapidly reducing primary growth forests as a resource but polluting the global atmosphere as well. Indeed, commodification and privatization of resources is a trend and a problem in regard to virtually all resources. And radical changes in the structure and process of all natural and human-constructed resources can occur through the development of new technologies. The goal of this paper is to summarize the lessons learned from a large body of international, interdisciplinary research on common-pool resources (CPRs) in the past 25 years and consider its usefulness in the analysis of the information as a resource. We will suggest ways in which the study of the governance and management of common-pool resources can be applied to the analysis of information and ?the intellectual public domain.? The complexity of the issues is enormous for many reasons: the vast number of players, multiple conflicting interests, the general lack of understanding of digital technologies, local versus global arenas, and a chronic lack of precision about the information resource at hand. We suggest, in the tradition of Hayek, that the combination of time and place analysis with general scientific knowledge is necessary for sufficient understanding of policy and action. In addition, the careful development of an unambiguous language and agreed-upon definitions is imperative. As one of the framing papers for this conference, we will focus on the language, the methodology, and outcomes of research on common-pool resources in order to better understand how property regimes affect the provision, production, distribution, appropriation, and consumption of scholarly information. Our brief analysis will suggest that collective action and new institutional design play as large a part in the shaping of scholarly information as do legal restrictions and market forces.
The Calculus of Commitment: The Ostroms, The Workshop and The Commons
(2010) Hess, Charlotte
"When Elinor Ostrom was interviewed at Indiana University after winning the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for her study of economic governance, particularly the commons, she said 'The prize did come to me personally, but it would never have come but for the work I did with Vincent Ostrom all these years and the Workshop.' This piece ponders those humble words by a world-renown scholar through an—albeit brief—examination of the decades-long collaboration between Lin and Vincent Ostrom: two brilliant minds committed to better understanding the complexities of human behavior and the challenges of cooperation."
Copyright
(2005) Hess, Charlotte; Revelle, Andrew
"Authors often do not know much about copyright and simply hand over their rights to publishers. Typically a publisher will ask you to sign a copyright/license agreement. The documents purpose is to transfer to the publisher ownership of copyright in your work or otherwise convey to the publisher a bundle of rights, one of which is the right to publish your article. The right to self-archive the refereed postprint is a legal matter, because the copyright transfer agreement pertains to that text. But the pre-refereeing preprint is self archived at a time when no copyright transfer agreement exists and the author holds exclusive and full copyright. So publisher policy forbidding prior self-archiving of preprints is not a legal matter, but merely a journal policy matter.
Dilemmas of Building a Sustainable Equitable Information Resource
(1998) Hess, Charlotte
"Because information plays a central role in environmental and CPR research, the quality, flow, and timeliness of of intellectual resources are crucial. The development agency community repeatedly stresses the intricate relationship between information access and economic development (UNDP, 1997; Mchombu, 1996; McConnell, 1996; Baranshamaje, 1995; Valantin, 1996). International information specialists write about the urgent need for local, appropriate information in locally-designed libraries which better serve local, indigenous communities (Alemna, 1996; Matare, 1997; Kuntze, 1996; Ifidon, 1990). Better accountability and communication of scientific information by researchers is also being voiced more frequently . In his keynote address at the 1996 IASCP conference, Marshall Murphee called for colleagues to take on the responsibility to actively share their knowledge and insights with communities and policymakers outside the academic arena 'who can use them to make a real difference' (Murphee 1996, 2). Neal Lane, Director of the National Science Foundation, urges researchers to become 'civil scientists' by reaching out to the public and engaging in 'genuine public dialogue with their local communities' (Lane 1997). "In this paper I examine some of the perplexing problems facing scholarly information as an essential and fundamental resource. My intention is to bring stronger attention to the changing nature of academic information, and the need to design new institutions for the access and distribution of environmental and CPR information. Examples are drawn from my research on academic libraries in Uganda and the U.S. While the dilemmas of managing an exponentially growing resource are on a global scale, strategies for better information management, like natural resources, must be designed at the local level."
A Framework for Analysing the Microbiological Commons
(2006) Hess, Charlotte; Ostrom, Elinor
From p. 336: "In this article we contribute to this new research agenda by presenting an analytical tool to help better understand this new type of commons. We also argue the critical importance of collective action in the success and ultimate sustainability of this commons. The complexity of the issues is enormous for many reasons: the vast number of players, multiple conflicting interests, rapid changes of technology, the general lack of understanding of digital technologies, local vs global arenas, and a chronic lack of precision about the information resource at hand. In order to bring greater clarity to this complex commons, we apply the institutional analysis and development (IAD) framework as an exploratory tool. Applying this framework, we will illustrate that collective action and new institutional design play as large a part in the shaping of scholarly information as do legal restrictions and market forces."
Framework for Analyzing Scholarly Communication as a Commons
(2004) Hess, Charlotte; Ostrom, Elinor
"In this paper, we extend our previous work, 'Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-Pool Resource' that was presented at the Conference on the Public Domain at Duke University Law School in November 2001 and published in Law & Contemporary Problems (2003) 66 (1-2):111-146, http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/lcp. The Duke paper argues that the dilemmas associated with managing information in the public domain are quite similar to those associated with managing natural resource common-pool resources (CPRs), where we can observe how the development of new technologies changes the structure and processes involved in managing these types of resources over time. We conclude that collective action and institutional design play key roles in shaping economic and social aspects of information. "This paper broadens the scope and presents a methodological tool for analyzing scholarly communication as a commons. The Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework can be a useful instrument to better understand this complex resource. Scholarly communication is a much larger and more complex resource than the intellectual public domain. It includes all kinds of scholarly information, with varying types of property rights regimes. It encompasses both the products, as well as the processes of teaching, research, creativity and other types of academic scholarship. "Conceptualizing scholarly communication as a commons has the advantage of putting focus on the need for collective action, self-governance, and evolving rules that are required for the successful management and sustainability of all shared resources. Applying institutional analysis enables a clearer understanding of the various human-technology-resource relationships, and how new technologies change the nature of the commons. As with the 'environment,' this knowledge commons holds within it an entire ecosystem that reflects complex interactions between humans and the resources. "Understanding this new type of commons and applying an institutional analysis framework may facilitate a new, interdisciplinary, research agenda. This is a particularly difficult area to study and get one's hands around. And, as with all shared resources, management issues can be complex, conflicts can develop, and outcomes are uncertain. The research agenda we propose would bring to the fore the most basic and fundamental questions in society: Is the scholarly communication system, as it is developing, sustainable? Are we making wise and informed decisions as we rapidly change our universities? Do universities have increased or decreased responsibilities to society? Is the relationship between knowledge and democracy still understood in the academic mission?"
Framework for Analyzing the Knowledge Commons (Draft)
(MIT Press, 2005) Hess, Charlotte; Ostrom, Elinor
"Who hasn't heard of the six blind men of Indostan encircled around an elephant? The six-one a political scientist, one a librarian, one an economist, one a law professor, one a computer scientist, and one an anthropologist-discover, based on their own investigations, that the object before them is a wall, spear, a snake, a tree, a fan, and a rope. The story fits well with the question that propelled this chapter: how can an interdisciplinary group of scholars best analyze a highly complex, rapidly evolving, elephantine resource such as knowledge? Trying to get one's hands around knowledge as a shared resource is even more challenging when we factor in the economic, legal, technological, political, social and psychological components-each complex in their own right-that make up this global commons."
Ideas, Artifacts, and Facilities: Information as a Common-Pool Resource
(2003) Hess, Charlotte; Ostrom, Elinor
"The goal of this paper is to summarize the lessons learned from a large body of international, interdisciplinary research on common-pool resources (CPRs) in the past 25 years and consider its usefulness in the analysis of scholarly information as a resource. We will suggest ways in which the study of the governance and management of common-pool resources can be applied to the analysis of information and 'the intellectual public domain.' The complexity of the issues is enormous for many reasons: the vast number of players, multiple conflicting interests, rapid changes of technology, the general lack of understanding of digital technologies, local versus global arenas, and a chronic lack of precision about the information resource at hand. We suggest, in the tradition of Hayek, that the combination of time and place analysis with general scientific knowledge is necessary for sufficient understanding of policy and action. In addition, the careful development of an unambiguous language and agreed-upon definitions is imperative. "As one of the framing papers for the Conference on the Public Domain, we focus on the language, the methodology, and outcomes of research on common-pool resources in order to better understand how various types of property regimes affect the provision, production, distribution, appropriation, and consumption of scholarly information. Our analysis will suggest that collective action and new institutional design play as large a part in the shaping of scholarly information as do legal restrictions and market forces."
Indigenous Knowledge
(2005) Delaney, Alyne; Hess, Charlotte
"Interest in indigenous knowledge (IK) especially that of biological resources has been increasing over the last two decades, particularly with the advance of information technologies. Individuals, corporations, and nation states compete to file patents on discoveries learned from IK. The number of patents filed has steadily grown over the past ten years. Large transnational corporations like Monsanto, DuPont and others have been investing into biotechnology in such a way that patents have been taken out on indigenous plants which have been used for generations by the local people, without their knowledge or consent. The people then find that the only way to use their age-old knowledge is be to buy them back from the big corporations. In Brazil, which has some of the richest biodiversity in the world, large multinational corporations have already patented more than half the known plant species."
The Information Commons and IASCP
(2003) Hess, Charlotte
"Throughout its short history, the focus of most IASCP research has been natural resource management. The primary mission of our organization has been to improve institutions 'for the management of environmental resources'."
Is There Anything New Under the Sun? A Discussion and Survey of Studies on New Commons and the Internet
(2000) Hess, Charlotte
"This paper surveys the literature of 'new commons,' the Internet and other new CPRs. It examines newly-identified CPRs in the context of the traditional literature and suggests appropriate areas for further research. One of the striking observations is a remarkable growth in the use of the word 'commons' applied to the Internet in the popular and even scientific literature. "Prior to 1968 most references to 'commons' were to the common fields of former European systems and their enclosure. In the US, reference was usually to public spaces for town meetings or a campus common eating area. Until Hardin coined his metaphor, 'Tragedy of the Commons,' the commons as a pessimistic social dilemma was used but infrequently applied (Scott, Gordon, and the obscure Lloyd). The establishment of the CPR network in the early 80s (and the subsequent foundation of IASCP) brought together an international group of scholars whose research was demonstrating the contrary conclusion: that CPR systems could be quite successful and long-enduring. Recently, in the information and technology disciplines, the term 'commons' has become a buzzword for ideas of freedom of speech, free exchange of information, public access etc. "Since the 1995 IASCP conference 'Reinventing the Commons' there has been a more widely spread acknowledgment that new commons are occurring everyday and that there needs to be further research in this area. This paper argues that new commons, such as the Internet, need to be the foci of much further study, subject to careful examination with clear definitions, with specified boundaries and users."
The Knowledge Commons: Theory and Collective Action; or Kollektive Aktionismus?
(2004) Hess, Charlotte
"This is an informal talk "the origins of the concept of the commons, the history of the term, and the emergence of an interdisciplinary school of scholarship on common pool resources." The paper was presented at the closing plenary session "The Future of the Digital Commons" at the WOS3 conference in Berlin 2004. This presentation was accompanied by David Bollier's paper "Is the Commons a Movement?" available at http://www.bollier.org/pdf/BerlinWizardsofOS3speechJune2004.pdf"
Mapping the New Commons
(2008) Hess, Charlotte
From Introduction: "This paper is a guide to the rapidly growing area of research and activity I call 'new commons.' Simply put, new commons (NC) are various types of shared resources that have recently evolved or have been recognized as commons. They are commons without pre-existing rules or clear institutional arrangements. The paper introduces a map that outlines the NC resource sectors and identifies some of the salient questions that this new area of research raises. In addition, it examines the relationship between new commons and traditional common-pool resources and common property regimes. "This overview includes a survey of the physical resources, the user communities, the literature, and some of the major collective action activities. Tacking new commons over several years has demonstrated that this vast arena is inhabited by heterogeneous groups from divergent disciplines, political interests, and geographical regions that are increasingly finding the term 'commons' crucial in addressing issues of social dilemmas, degradation, and sustainability of a wide variety of shared resources. The resource sectors include scientific knowledge, voluntary associations, climate change, community gardens, wikipedias, cultural treasures, plant seeds, and the electromagnetic spectrum. All of these new resource sectors and communities require rigorous study and analysis in order to better grasp the institutional nature of these beasts. This map is designed to serve as an introductory reference guide for future scholarly work."
The Name Change; or, What Happened to the 'P'?
(2006) Hess, Charlotte; Meinzen-Dick, Ruth
"This past spring, members voted to change the name and the mission statement of the association. Overnight Common Property morphed into the Commons, as our association became The International Association for the Study of the Commons. This was, however, not a quick or rash decision. Rather it was a thoroughly discussed issue by the Council and members over the past four years."
Private and Common Property Rights
(2007) Ostrom, Elinor; Hess, Charlotte
"The relative advantages of private property and common property for the efficiency, equity, and sustainability of natural resource use patterns have long been debated in the legal and economics literatures. The debate has been clouded by a troika of confusions that relate to the difference between (1) common-property and open-access regimes, (2) common-pool resources and common-property regimes, and (3) a resource system and the flow of resource units. A property right is an enforceable authority to undertake particular actions in specific domains. The rights of access, withdrawal, management, exclusion, and alienation can be separately assigned to different individuals as well as being viewed as a cumulative scale moving from the minimal right of access through possessing full ownership rights. Some attributes of common-pool resources are conducive to the use of communal proprietorship or ownership and others are conducive to individual rights to withdrawal, management, exclusion and alienation. There are, however, no panaceas! No institutions generate better outcomes for the resource and for the users under all conditions. Many of the lessons learned from the operation of communal property regimes related to natural resource systems are theoretically relevant to understanding of a wide diversity of property regimes that are extensively used in modern societies."
Resource Guide for Authors: Open Access, Copyright, and the Digital Commons
(2005) Hess, Charlotte
"This article aims to introduce you to the important issues about copyright and open access; to convince you that providing open access to your research is a right and a responsibility; and to provide concrete information and instructions so that all of you can easily contribute and enrich the global information commons. This is a push for institutional change, commoners, because few of you see yourselves as archivists, publishers, or librarians. But you must begin to take an active role in freeing information. The information that the world needs and values is in your hands."
Studying Scholarly Communication: Can Commons Research and the IAD Framework Help Illuminate Complex Dilemmas?
(2004) Hess, Charlotte; Ostrom, Elinor
"This paper presents a framework for analyzing the complex resource of scholarly communication as a commons. Previously we have argued that the dilemmas associated with managing shared information are quite similar to those associated with managing natural and human-constructed common-pool resources (CPRs), where we can observe how the development of new technologies has changed the structure and processes involved in managing these types of resources over time. We concluded that collective action and institutional design play key roles in shaping economic and social aspects of information. "However, applying insights from the CPR literature on physical resource management to information management highlights the complexity of the issues involved in managing these particular processes and outcomes: there are many, diverse participants in producing and consuming information who often have conflicting interests; the nature of production and provision is often difficult to analyze and describe with the kind of specificity that is required to manage these processes effectively; digital technologies continue to evolve and are not always well-understood; production and consumption occurs in local and global arenas. "Whereas earlier we focused on applying the language, definitions, methodology, and outcomes of research on common-pool resources to understanding information management, in this paper we will extend and refine this analysis to develop a framework for analyzing the governance issues that arise from scholarly communication and the implications for further research."
Untangling the Web: The Internet as a Commons
(1996) Hess, Charlotte
"This paper explores the concept of reinventing as 'creating anew,' with the global network of computer networks called the Internet as a sublime example of a new common pool resource (CPR). A commons is not a resource existing independently in nature but rather a human artifact -- an institution crafted by human beings. Nor is a commons an archaic, old-fashioned, idyllic human arrangement unique to indigenous societies. Rather it is a type of good, a resource, which can have either public or private ownership but which is managed and used jointly by a group. The community in a common pool resource is composed of those individuals who use it and have a vested interest in its success."
The Virtual CPR: The Internet as a Local and Global Common Pool Resource
(1995) Hess, Charlotte
"This paper outlines a new research agenda to study the Internet as an intricate and complex common pool resource, both on the local and global level. It identifies four different and, at times, overlapping types of commons within the Internet, each of with have distinctive properties and require different institutional arrangements: a social commons, an information commons, a budget commons and a technical infrastructure commons. Several conditions are contributing to the growing competition for this resource: every member is able to be an information provider (publisher); the number of users is rapidly increasing; many newcomers do not know or understand the rules; there is increasing competition for supporting funds of new information technologies; the technical infrastructure is not growing at the same pace as the growth in use; the introduction of resource-demanding applications (like the graphic images and hypertext linkages of the World Wide Wed) is growing rapidly; and there is poor communication and ill-defined roles among network operators, corporate owners, governing bodies and the different types of users. Indeed, the rise of these dilemmas illustrates the need for closer examination of the connections between the physical arrangements, the community of users, and the rules in use which contribute to the issues of speed and access. By studying the Internet as a common pool resource, it may be possible to understand the problems more clearly in order to arrive at sustainable solutions."