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6CCVD Research

Open Access Models, Pirate Libraries and Advocacy Repertoires - Policy Options for Academics to Construct and Govern Knowledge Commons

At a Glance

Section titled “At a Glance”
MetadataDetails
Publication Date2021-02-04
JournalWestminster Papers in Communication and Culture
AuthorsMĂ©lanie Dulong de Rosnay
InstitutionsInternet Society
Citations8
AnalysisFull AI Review Included

Executive Summary

Section titled “Executive Summary”

This analysis applies theoretical frameworks of Knowledge Commons governance (Ostromian literature) to the academic publishing ecosystem, focusing on policy options for constructing and governing shared academic resources.

  • System Governance Focus: The study shifts the focus from mere end-user access rights (Creative Commons licensing) to the governance, political economy, and technical infrastructure of academic publishing.
  • Economic Inefficiency: Commercial academic publishing is identified as a highly profitable industry (profit margins often 30%+), despite relying heavily on unpaid academic labor (authorship, editing, reviewing).
  • Model Analysis: A comparative analysis of Open Access (OA) models is conducted, including Gold (APC-based), Green (self-archiving), Diamond (non-profit, no fees), Platinum, and Pirate/Shadow Libraries (e.g., Academic Torrents).
  • Commons Framework Application: Ostrom’s eight governance design principles are adapted to the intangible nature of knowledge, emphasizing community control over infrastructure and rules matching local contexts.
  • Infrastructure Control: The paper highlights the critical need for academics to control scholarly production tools (e.g., repositories, metrics infrastructure) to counter the rent-seeking redirection of big publishers (e.g., Elsevier acquiring SSRN).
  • Advocacy Repertoire: Recommendations are provided for academics, librarians, and institutions, ranging from collective self-archiving initiatives (Green OA) to radical individual actions (publishing in pirate libraries, boycotting high-cost publishers).

Technical Specifications

Section titled “Technical Specifications”

The following table extracts key quantitative and structural parameters related to the governance and economic structure of the academic publishing ecosystem, treated here as the “Academic Knowledge Commons” system.

ParameterValueUnitContext
Commercial Publisher Profit MarginUp to 30+PercentageHigh-end profit margins in academic publishing.
Ostrom Governance Principles8PrinciplesInstitutional design framework for managing common pool resources.
Green OA Embargo Period (STEM)6MonthsMaximum legal embargo period (e.g., France 2016 law).
Green OA Embargo Period (HSS)12-24MonthsMaximum legal embargo period for Humanities/Social Sciences (e.g., France 2016 law).
Compliance with OA Mandates (Canada SSHRC)23-90PercentageEmpirical range of author compliance with funder mandates.
Highest Degree of Open AccessCCO Public Domain WaiverLegal StatusRelease of work with no conditions on reproduction or reuse (frictionless for data mining).
Intermediate CC License LevelCC BYLegal StatusAttribution-only requirement; corresponds to general scientific citation usage.

Key Methodologies

Section titled “Key Methodologies”

The analysis of Open Access models and the Academic Knowledge Commons is structured using several established analytical frameworks, adapted for intangible resources and governance structures.

  1. Legal Levels of Open Access (Static Analysis):

    • Focus: Analyzing the legal conditions of access and reuse rights afforded to end-users.
    • Tools: Creative Commons licensing options (CC BY, CC BY-NC-ND, CCO waiver) and Elinor Ostrom’s concept of the “bundle of rights” (access, withdrawal, management, exclusion, alienation).
    • Application: Mapping traditional Roman property law categories (usus, fructus, abusus) onto copyright licensing to understand shared rights.

  2. Ostromian Theoretical Frameworks for Commons Governance:

    • Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) Framework: Used to study the governance of academic commons as a complex, co-produced system.
    • Eight Governance Design Principles: Applied to identify necessary conditions for successful co-production and management of common goods (e.g., clearly defined group boundaries, rules matching local needs, monitoring systems, graduated sanctions).

  3. Knowledge Commons Adaptation (Hess & Ostrom / Frischmann et al.):

    • Focus: Adapting Ostrom’s principles, originally for tangible resources, to intangible knowledge resources (non-rivalrous nature).
    • Key Research Questions: Used to analyze specific OA models regarding openness definition, legal structure, informal norms, benefits delivered, and roles/objectives of community members (commoners).

  4. Radical Theories and Infrastructure Commons:

    • Focus: Incorporating theories related to infrastructure commons (Frischmann) and pirate libraries (Mars & Medak) to analyze the political economy and technical infrastructure of publishing platforms.
    • Application: Framing academic commons platforms as political alternatives challenging neoliberal governance, requiring community-led infrastructure ownership (e.g., COPIM project).

Commercial Applications

Section titled “Commercial Applications”

This research, while focused on policy and governance, has direct implications for the design, sustainability, and operation of infrastructure supporting scholarly communication.

  • Scholarly Infrastructure Development: Provides governance models for community-led, non-profit platforms (e.g., Open Journal Systems (OJS), OpenEdition) to ensure sustainability and control over the research lifecycle, countering the acquisition of scholarly tools by large commercial publishers.
  • Funder and Institutional Policy Design (Plan S): Offers a framework for evaluating funder mandates (like Plan S) against commons principles, specifically regarding the monitoring of compliance, transparency of Article Processing Charges (APCs), and ensuring local autonomy for different academic disciplines (e.g., monographs).
  • Digital Preservation and Archiving: Informs the technical and legal design of distributed repositories (e.g., Academic Torrents) to ensure permanent access and preservation of research output, especially in cases where institutional repositories are constrained by restrictive publisher agreements.
  • Academic Evaluation Systems: Supports the shift toward qualitative assessment of research (intrinsic merit of work) over quantitative metrics (Impact Factor), aligning with DORA principles and promoting policies that reward adherence to open access principles in hiring and promotion.
  • Legal Strategy for Open Data: Provides a legal and political rationale for researchers and institutions to advocate for stronger exceptions to copyright (Text and Data Mining) and to utilize alternative, decentralized platforms to share datasets that might otherwise be locked behind paywalls or restrictive licenses.
View Original Abstract

In this article, I propose exploring open access publishing through the lenses of Knowledge Commons. Instead of focusing on users’ rights to access and reuse the output under open copyright licensing conditions, I study the governance of the academic publishing ecosystem, and its political economy, technical and labour infrastructure. Based on selected examples, I discuss how they comply with the concept of the commons.I use analytical frameworks from the Ostromian literature of the governance of Knowledge Commons to provide insights on the various steps of academic publishing work as a process. I then analyse a scope of open access publishing projects, including gold, green, diamond, platinum and pirate libraries. Finally, I draw from practices a repertoire of advocacy actions and I make recommendations for academics to develop policies supporting Academic Commons. 

Tech Support

Section titled “Tech Support”

Original Source

Section titled “Original Source”

References

Section titled “References”
  1. 2019 - Awareness and perception of physicists towards self-archiving in arxiv.org open access repository in northwestern Nigeria
  2. 2018 - Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education [Crossref]
  3. 2020 - Can scholarly pirate libraries bridge the knowledge access gap? An empirical study on the structural conditions of book piracy in global and European academia [Crossref]
  4. 2014 - The SAGE Handbook of Intellectual Property
  5. 2016 - Degrees of freedom, dimensions of power [Crossref]
  6. 2013 - Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science
  7. 2017 - Institutional repositories versus ResearchGate: The depositing habits of Spanish researchers [Crossref]
  8. 2019 - Text and data mining in the EU ‘Acquis Communautaire’ tinkering with TDM & digital legal deposit [Crossref]

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