Open Science Economy
Creativity, Collaboration & the Commons
Michael A. Peters
“Structuring knowledge: new visions of higher education”
Monday 25th and Tuesday 26th June 2012
Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford
Taking back the commons
COGNITIVE CAPITALISM
Cognitive capitalism
• Cognitive capitalism has emerged as a global
economic system based on the development
of virtual (immaterial) economy (‘third
capitalism’) focused on the increasing
informatization (digitization) of production,
with increasing formalization,
mathematicization and digitization of
language, communication, and knowledge
systems.
Cognitive Capitalism
Socialization of media
• the emergence of social media, social
networking and social mode of production
enhanced by Web 2.0 technologies and
distributed knowledge and learning systems
• decreasing cost of network access,
knowledge-sharing and transmission, and
greater ‘borderless’ interconnectedness of
knowledge spaces (emergence of ‘world
brain’)
‘immaterial labour’
• Networks and flows of immaterial labor are
based on mass participation and collaboration
rather than traditional Smithian division of labor
that is nonlinear and comprise dynamical systems
of labor.
• the emergence of team or network as
fundamental labor units in a new political
economy of peer production (‘Interneting’) based
on cooperation and collaboration rather than
competition.
The academic economy
• The new open communications environment has
the power to reshape the university as a
networked environment, allowing the emergence
of radically decentred forms of social
nonproprietarian and nonmarket models of
academic production and exchange, alongside
market and property forms, that will transform
cultural production in general and the concepts
of readership, scholarship and authorship that
have ruled the academic economy.
Theory of the commons
• Before 1995, few thinkers saw the connection
between “information” and “commons”
• Mid 1990s saw flourishing of articles in legal
reviews on new knowledge commons
• Commons became a buzzword for digital
information, which was being enclosed,
commodified, and overpatented
Some examples
• Benkler, Yochai. 1998. “Overcoming Agoraphobia: Building the Commons
of the Digitally Networked Environment.” Harvard Journal of Law and
Technology 11(2):287–400.
• Boyle, James. 2003. “The Second Enclosure Movement and the
Construction of the Public Domain.” Law and Contemporary Problems
66(1–2):33–74. http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/66LCPBoyle
• Brin, David. 1995. “The Internet as a Commons.” Information Technology
and Libraries 14(4):240–242.
• David, Paul A. 2000. The Digital Technology Boomerang: New Intellectual
Property Rights Threaten Global “Open Science.” Stanford, CA:
Department of Economics, Stanford University. http://wwwecon.stanford.edu/faculty/workp/swp00016.pdf
• Heller, Michael A. 1998. “The Tragedy of the Anticommons: Property in
the Transition from Marx to Markets.” Harvard Law Review 111(3):622–
688.
Some distinctions
• Shared resource systems—called common-pool
resources —are types of economic goods,
independent of particular property rights.
• Common property on the other hand is a legal
regime—a jointly owned legal set of rights
• Self-organized commons require strong
collective-action and selfgoverning mechanisms
• Social capital refers to the aggregate value of
social networks (i.e., who people know), and the
inclinations that arise from these networks
“The Tragedy of the Commons”
• Hardin, Garrett. 1968. “The Tragedy of the
Commons.” Science 162:1243– 1248.
• “Ruin is the destination toward which all men
rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a
society that believes in the freedom of the
commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin
to all.”
Inventing the commons
Antonio Negri and Judith Revel, 2008
• “Creating value today, is to position subjectivities
in networks and to capture, detourn and
appropriate the common which they unveil and
create.”
• “Without the common, capitalism cannot exist.
With the common, the possibilities of conflict,
resistance and appropriation are infinitely
increased. What a beautiful paradox in an age
which has finally succeeded in ridding itself of the
tatters of Modernity.”
Taking back the common
• “In order to re-appropriate our common, above all we
need to produce a drastic critique… Our common, is
not our fundament, but our production, our invention
that continually starts anew. ‘We’: the name of a
horizon, the name of a future. The common is always
in front of us, it is a process. We are this common:
making, producing, participating, moving, sharing,
circulating, enriching, inventing, restarting.”
• “Today democracy can no longer be thought of but in
radically different terms: as common management of
the common.”
Preliminary sketch
OPEN SCIENCE ECONOMY
Openness and Knowledge Production
• Manifesto for Education in the Age of Cognitive
Capitalism: Freedom, Creativity and Culture,
Economics, Management, and Financial Markets,
6(1), 2011, pp. 63–92.
• Three Forms of Knowledge Economy: Learning,
Creativity, Openness, British Journal of
Educational Studies, 58 (1), 2010: 67-88.
• Creativity, Openness and the Global Knowledge
Economy: The Advent of User-generated
Cultures, Economics, Management, and Financial
Markets, 2011, 5(3).
Openness & Rise of Global Science
• On the Philosophy of Open Science, The International
Journal of Science in Society, 1 (1), 2009: 1-27.
• The Changing Architecture of Global Science, Policy Brief
and Occasional Paper (long version), Center for Global
Studies, University of Illinois, 2009, at www.cgs.uiuc.edu.
• The Rise of Global Science and the Emerging Political
Economy of International Research Collaborations,
European Journal of Education: Research, development and
policies, ‘The European University: between governance,
discipline and network’ 41 (2): 225-244.
• Open Education and the Open Science Economy, Yearbook
of the National Society for the Study of Education, Thomas
S. Popkewitz & Fazal Rizvi (Eds.), 2009: 203-225.
Openness and Global Commons
• ‘Openness’ and the Global Knowledge Commons: An
Emerging Mode of Social Production for Education and
Science. In: Hugh Lauder, Michael Young, Harry Daniels,
Maria Balarin, John Lowe (Eds.) Educating for the
Knowledge Economy? Critical Perspectives. Oxford,
Routledge, 2012.
• ‘Knowledge Economy,’ Economic Crisis & Cognitive
Capitalism: Public Education and the Promise of Open
Science. In: David R Cole (Ed.) Surviving Economic Crises
through Education, New York, Peter Lang, 2012.
• Knowledge Socialism: Intellectual Commons and Openness
in the University. In: Ronald Barnett (Ed.) The Future
University: Ideas and Possibilities. London, Routledge, 2011.
Open Science Economy
Distributed knowledge systems
• The open-science economy (OSE) is a
rapidly growing sector of the global
knowledge economy utilizing opensource models and its multiple
applications (e.g. open access, open
archiving, open publishing, open
repositories) in distributed knowledge
and learning systems.
User-generated knowledge production
• This rich-text, highly interactive, usergenerated OSE has seen linear models of
knowledge production give way to more
diffuse, open-ended, decentralized, and
serendipitous knowledge processes
based on open innovation and Web 2
platform technologies.
p2p knowledge systems
• Peer-to-peer distributed knowledge
systems rival the scope and quality of
traditional proprietary products through
the diffusion speed and global access of
open-source projects, especially in both
software and open-source biology.
Non-propertarian
• OSE encourages innovation-smart
processes based on the radical nonpropertarian sharing of content, cloud
data computing, and the leveraging of
cross-border international exchanges and
collaborations.
Social mode of production
• OSE encourages a culture of distributed,
collaborative, decentralized model of
research that is genuinely participatory,
involving the wider public and amateur
scientists along with experts in the social
mode of open knowledge production.
Global science gateways
• OSE provides an alternative to the
intellectual property approach to dealing
with difficult problems in the allocation of
resources for the production and distribution
of knowledge and information. Increasingly,
portal-based knowledge environments and
global science gateways support
collaborative science.
Open-source informatics
& revival of the public
• Open-source informatics enables knowledge
grids that interconnect science communities,
databases, and new computational tools.
• Open science is seen as a means for
revitalizing public institutions and for
developing scientific creativity and innovation
at a global level through international
collaboration.
The beginning
THE ERA OF OPEN SCIENCE
The Era of Open Science
The Web of Science
Purposes of Open Science
Towards open science in the 21st
century, 2012
• The grand challenges of the 21st century transcend
borders, and science will be increasingly global. A
strong commitment to open science by the scientific
community, as represented by ALLEA and its Member
Academies, and by science funders, like the European
Commission, will stimulate science inside and outside
of Europe: the emerging Global Knowledge Partnership
promises more efficient data-sharing, amplification of
observations, replication of experiments, better testing
of theories and accelerates innovation. It will enhance
transparency and integrity to the scientific enterprise.
A Vision for Open Science in the 21st
century
• “Powerful digital technologies for data
acquisition, storage and manipulation create new
opportunities, but also risk widening the “digital
divide”. Open Science envisages optimal sharing
of research results and tools: publications, data,
software, and educational resources. It will rely
on advanced e-infrastructures that enable online
research collaboration. The potential to link
cognate, and to re-use initially unrelated datasets
will reveal unexpected relationships and will
trigger new dynamics of scientific discovery.”
Open science environments
• “The collective intelligence of scientific
communities will be unleashed through new
collaborations across institutional, disciplinary,
sectoral and national boundaries. The open
science environments will help restore
transparency and integrity to the scientific
enterprise, for all to see. New points of exchange
with non-academic end-users of scientific
knowledge will be created, and progress will be
made towards the vision of scientifically literate
societies: this may require releasing scientific
data in forms that are accessible to citizens.”
Requirements for Open Science
• Open Scientific Content arising from
publicly funded research
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Publications should be made openly available online, as soon and as freely as
possible, as should also educational resources and software resulting from
publicly funded research.
• Open e-Infrastructures for public and
private research
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High-performance and economically efficient ICT infrastructures are needed to
manage the expected scale of future data flows
• Towards an Open Science Culture
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Academic assessment and reward systems should see merit in participation in the
culture of sharing, in enabling online collaboration and reproducible e-science.
"Open Infrastructures for Open
Science”, 2012
• The European Commission is drawing up a proposal to
open up access to the results of research funded under
its proposed €85 billion (US$111 billion) Horizon 2020
research programme.
• “there is no reason why subscription access only
models should remain dominant for access to research
publications in an era when distribution costs approach
zero.”
•
Neelie Kroes, VP of EC, responsible for the Digital Agenda for Europe
The Era of Open Science
• “We [are entering] the era of open science.
Take ‘Big Data’ analysis. Every year, the
scientific community produces data 20 times
as large as that held in the US Library of
Congress.”
• “Open access databases like the European
EMBL and the US GenBank double every nine
months, and already store over 400 billion
DNA bases.
Scientific computing, open journals systems, linked open data
ELEMENTS OF OPEN SCIENCE
Developments of scientific computing
• Cluster supercomputers and high performance
storage systems
• the invention and analysis of new core
algorithms
• advanced software development and
exploration of new architectures for largescale computing
• New forms of data mining and analysis
Emergence of bioinformatics
• Informatization of biology; Biologization of
information
• “Bio-informational Capitalism”, forthcoming in Thesis
Eleven, 2012:
• “Organic computing is a form of biologically-inspired
computing with organic properties that has emerged for as
the future of information processing systems. Networks of
intelligent systems can act more independently, flexibly,
and autonomously, exhibiting life-like properties that
demonstrate propensities for self-organization, selfconfiguration, self-healing, self-protection and contextawareness.”
Open source based scientific
computing
1. Open source software enables researchers to rapidly
reproduce the results of computational experiments
and explore the behavior of algorithms
2. Open data enables researchers to apply their software
to pertinent test cases, and compare competing
algorithms.
3. Open Science provides many other benefits including
fostering rapid innovation, fair comparison of
technology, and providing an ideal resource for
educating technologists of the future
Open Access Journals
PLoS - An example
OPEN DATA INITIATIVES ARE
BECOMING WIDESPREAD
Networks of scientific knowledge
PLoS
Nonprofit publisher
Public Library of Science journals
• PLoS publishes seven peer-reviewed open-access journals.
The journals vary in their selectivity and contain differing
amounts of commentary articles from opinion leaders in a
variety of scientific disciplines. They include:
• PLoS ONE
• PLoS Genetics
• PLoS Pathogens
• PLoS Computational Biology PLoS Neglected Tropical
Diseases
• PLoS Medicine
• PLoS Biology
The Wellcome Trust, 2012
• The Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s largest
biomedical charities, will launch its own free
online publication to compete with subscriptionbased journals and enable scientists to make
their research findings freely available.
• The paradox was that peer review was one of the
biggest costs of publishing papers: scientists do it
for free and then the fruits of their review work
are "locked behind a paywall”
-Sir Mark Walport
“The Academic Spring”
• Nearly 11,000 researchers who signed up to a
boycott of journals that restrict free sharing,
initiated by Tim Gowers, the British
mathematician.
• It is part of a campaign that supporters call
the “academic spring”, due to its aim to
revolutionise the spread of knowledge.
Open access to academic research
• UK Science Minister David
Willetts
• “Giving people the right
to roam freely over
publicly funded research
will usher in a new era of
academic discovery and
collaboration, and will put
the UK at the forefront of
open research.”
The new taxonomies and data universes
OPEN AGGREGATE DATA SITES
DATA.GOV
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Linked Data
Linked data is data in which real-world things are given addresses on the web (URIs), and data is published
about them in machine-readable formats at those locations. Other datasets can then point to those things
using their URIs, which means that people using the data can find out more about something without that
information being copied into the original dataset. This page lists the sectors for which we currently
publish linked data and some additional resources that will help you to use it. Most sectors have one or
more SPARQL endpoints, which enable you to perform searches across the data; you can access these
interactively on this site. Reference Reference data covers the central working of government, including
organisational structures where these have been made available as RDF. Browse
Visualisation
Government Departments
Other Public Bodies
Ministers
Members of Parliament
Members of the House of Lords
Companies House
The Open Science Project
Data Hub
CKAN
(Comprehensive Knowledge Archive
Network)
Infochimps
Numbrary
free service helps you find, use, and share numbers from public record data sets, like census data
LOD & OGD
LINKED OPEN DATA
Linked Open Data
• Simple animation to explain what Linked Open
Data is and why it's a good thing, both for
users and for data providers. To find more
information about Europeana's linked data
pilot, visit data.europeana.eu.
• http://vimeo.com/36752317
• pro.europeana.eu/support-for-open-data
• data.europeana.eu currently contains open
metadata on 2.4 million texts, images, videos
and sounds gathered by Europeana. These
objects come from data providers who have
reacted early and positively to Europeana's
initiative of promoting more open data and
new data exchange agreements
Open Government & Open
(Government) Data
• The Memorandum on Transparency and Open
Government, President Obama 2009
• http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_officeTransparencyandOpenGover
nment
• “My Administration is committed to creating an
unprecedented level of openness in Government. We
will work together to ensure the public trust and
establish a system of transparency, public
participation, and collaboration. Openness will
strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency
and effectiveness in Government.”
Open Government Data
(OGD)
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Open Government Partnership, 2011
http://www.opengovpartnership.org
Open Government declaration – 46 gov’ts
Open Government Data (OGD) is seen as a crucial
aspect of Open Government
• OGD is a worldwide movement to open up
government/public administration data, information
and content to both human and machine-readable
non-proprietary formats for re-use by civil society,
economy, media and academia as well as by politicians
and public administrators.
OGD principles
http://www.opengovdata.org/home/8principles
1. Data must be complete
2. Data must be primary
3. Data must be timely
4. Data must be accessible
5. Data must be machine-processable
6. Access must be non-discriminatory
7. Data formats must be non-proprietary
8. Data must be license-free
9. Permanence – finding information over time
10. Usage costs – de minimus
Significance of Open Data
• Digital Agenda for Europe:
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http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/digital-agenda
• eGovernment Action Plan Europe 2011–2015:
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http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/egovernment/action_plan_2011_2015/
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http://bit.ly/s5FiQo
Open Data Strategy for Europe:
• Open Data Catalogue United States of America:
http://data.gov
• Open Data Catalogue of Australia:
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http://data.gov.au
• Open Data Catalogue United Kingdom:
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http://data.gov.uk
The Power of Linked Open Data
Understanding World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C)
vision of a new web of data
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mashing data is time-consuming and costly
Unconnected silos of data
Data is still locked up in applications
metadata and schema information are not
separated well from application logics
• Data cannot be easily re-used
Evolution of the Web
Linked Open Data Cloud
Open Science Policy Futures?
• Linked Open Data (LOD) in disciplinary clusters
• Open science in humanities, social sciences,
and media studies
• Interlinking public/private digital
infrastructures
• Publishing from LOD
• New public enterprise business models
Accessibility, Sustainability, Excellence: How to
Expand Access to Research Publications, 19 June 2012
• Report of the Working Group on Expanding
Access to Published Research Findings
• a “clear policy direction” should be set favouring
the so-called “gold” model, in which authors pay
upfront to make their papers open access.
• No imposition of open-access mandates
• concerned not to recommend measures that
would “damage high standards of peer review or
undermine the very successful publishing
industry”
Responses
• “The Finch Report is a successful case of
lobbying by publishers to protect the interests
of publishing at the expense of the interests of
research and the public that funds research.”
Steven Harnad
• The report at http://goo.gl/Os2s4
• The story and comments at
• http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectio
ncode=26&storycode=420307&c=1