Michael J. Madison (University of Pittsburgh - School of Law) has posted The University as Constructed Cultural Commons (Washington University Journal of Law and Policy, 2008) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This paper examines commons as socially constructed environments built via and alongside intellectual property rights systems. I sketch a theoretical framework for examining cultural commons across a broad variety of institutional and disciplinary contexts, and I apply that framework to the university and associated practices and institutions.
And a taste from the text:
For years, university and faculty practice in most disciplines has been to assign individual faculty copyrights in publishable scholarship to academic journals, which are often published by commercial firms that charge high prices for access – including high prices to faculty authors and their universities. The recent rise of the open access publishing movement, which relies on the existence of widely-available, cheap online storage and connectivity to justify calls for scholarly research to be openly available on the Internet, has introduced some new dynamics. The Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted a resolution granting the university licenses in their scholarly work in order to promote its distribution on open access terms.49 In a related move that also impacts universities, in late 2007 Congress recently mandated that scientific research produced with funding through the National Institutes of Health be made publicly available through the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central no later than 12 months after official publication.50 Rather than using the prospect of patents to pull information and knowledge out of university commons, open access arguments are using the prospect of even greater openness to accomplish a related goal.51
Recommended!
