Mertonianism Unbound? Imagining Free, Decentralised Access to Most Cultural and Scientific Material

Abstract

"This is a workshop about the commons and scholarly communications. I was honoured to be invited to it, and even played a small role in asking Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess to write one of the original papers that helped focus the inquiry. I have written extensively about intellectual property, the public domain and the commons and care deeply about the future of scholarly communications, particularly in the sciences. Designing an architecture for freer and more usefully accessible scholarly work is a fascinating task, and I agree with many of the participants that the literature on the commons has a number of insights to offer. So I was both pleased and excited to be given the task of writing about the commons and the public domain in scholarly communications. This enthusiastic prologue notwithstanding, I am going to stray from that task -- one that is performed ably by others in this distinguished group -- and instead suggest that we need to think still more broadly about our subject matter. My topic is Mertonianism beyond the world of scholarly communications: the impact that more open access to cultural and scientific materials beyond the academy might have on scholarship, culture and even science. One implication of the commons literature is that in attempting to construct a 'comedic' commons, one must think very carefully about its boundaries -- the limits on who may use it and for what types of use. The tendency of my argument here is that, in the scholarly communications commons, the boundaries ought to be very wide indeed: one important design principle is that wherever possible neither use, nor contribution, nor ability to participate in the fine-tuning of the system should be restricted to professional scholars."