costs and the emergence of strategic behaviour in the integration of complementary information resources. Further, they see collaborative private arrangements as stifling competition and imposing negative externalities on both consumers and prospective innovators.[1]
With this perspective, the recent developments and initiatives for the implementation of contractually-constructed research commons ask for a reassessment of this debate. These new organisational initiatives seem to provide a balance between the two diverging positions. Crucially, they recognize the benefits that can accrue to innovators from ownership and exclusivity. Nevertheless, these experiences use property rights to go beyond the familiar control of assets that occurs either within organisations, in markets for technologies or among parties of close-knit collaborative agreements. In turn, these experiences elicit a broader cooperative solution in the form of standard contractual regimes that should be adopted and shared by the members of research communities. The final goal is indeed to avoid unnecessary restrictions, to pool resources and to give researches access to the large aggregate that could result from the contributions of all those who adopt such contractual arrangements.
The main research question underlying this chapter is basically the same posed by scholars in the past years when realising the growing trend in the privatisation of scientific and research activities: given the expansion of proprietary and exclusion strategies, are institutions for the transfer of knowledge and information resources emerging or failing?[2] Answering this question is of paramount importance for assessing the viability and sustainability of the research commons initiatives as an alternative institutional framework for coordinating transactions.
If exchanges and transactions are fading, then to what extent are the commons-based forms of knowledge production effective and long-standing solutions to this problem? By contrast, it may be the case that the alleged deadlock in transacting and integrating resources is just a transitory condition, as more actors in the research communities will learn to interact trough market mechanisms or will develop networks of collaborative agreements.
- ↑ See Janet Hope, Biobazaar: The Open Source Revolution and Biotechnology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
- ↑ See Paul A. David, “Can Open Science Be Protected From the Evolving Regime of IPR Protections?”, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 160 (2004), 9–34; Michael A. Heller, “The Tragedy of the Anticommons: Property in the Transition from Marx to Markets”, Harvard Law Review, 111 (1998), 621–87; Michael A. Heller and Rebecca S. Eisenberg, “Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research”, Science, 28 (1998), 698–701.
