Yochai Benkler, Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production, Yale Law Journal, October 2004. Excerpt: 'The world's fastest supercomputer and the second-largest commuter transportation system in the United States function on a resource management model that is not well specified in contemporary economics. Both SETI@home, a distributed computing platform involving the computers of over four million volunteers, and carpooling, which accounts for roughly one-sixth of commuting trips in the United States, rely on social relations and an ethic of sharing, rather than on a price system, to mobilize and allocate resources. Yet they coexist with, and outperform, price-based and government-funded systems that offer substitutable functionality.' (PS: Benkler does not specifically discuss OA to literature or data, but produces a general theory that subsumes them. For summaries of Benkler's thesis, see David Bollier's posting to his On the Commons blog or the unsigned story the February 3 issue of The Economist.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/24/2005 10:13:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
