It is a curious fact that one of the seminal works on open culture and open science was published in 1965 (2nd edition 1971), several decades before the modern open culture and open science movements began in earnest. Mancur Olson’s book “The Logic of Collective Action” is a classic of economics and political science, a classic that contains much of interest for people interested in open science.
At the heart of Olson’s book is a very simple question: “How can collective goods be provided to a group?” Here, a “collective good” is something that all participants in the group desire (though possibly unevenly), and that, by its nature, is inherently shared between all the members of the group.
What Olson shows in the book is that although all parties in a group may strongly desire and benefit from a particular collective good (e.g., a stable climate), under many circumstances they will not take individual action to achieve that collective good. In particular, they often find it in their individual best interest to act against their collective interest. The book has a penetrating analysis of what conditions can cause individual and collective interests to be aligned, and what causes them to be out of alignement. ...
The notes in the present essay are much more fragmented than my standard essays. Rather than a single thesis, or a few interwoven themes, these are more in the manner of personal working notes, broken up into separate fragments, each one exploring some idea presented by Olson, and explaining how (if at all) I see it relating to open science. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 1/29/2009 08:38:00 PM.
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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
