I’ve just returned from the Summer ESIP Federation meeting, where we held a powerful discussion about the need for data commons (plural). This discussion got hung up a bit by a lack of clarity on the definitions of the terminology (including the word “commons”) and also a general lack of knowledge about the current literature on the commons (the group were mostly Earth data scientists).

So here I want to offer some short and very basic definitions (my own) and bring up some ideas and questions that might be of value to these discussions in the future. [I will also come back to this text in the future and link to a bibliography that is just now being created by the Force11 team.]

Scholarly commons are…

Intentional communities (plural) formed around the shared use of open scholarly resources (a type of common-pool resource). Commoners work together as a community to optimize the use of the open resources they share. Scholarly commons are resource-near communities. They have an immediate and professional stake in the open resources they want to use. The whole community assumes a stewardship role toward these resources. These groups are self-defining and self-governing, each with their own emergent rules. Since scholarly commons are built upon open public resources, anybody on the planet can access them. When these are digital resources, they are not diminished by overuse. However, these resources cannot be sustained without the commons, or some other economy. These commons represent the social/cultural destination for any number of open-science efforts. (Note: Principles that can help all scholarly commons work together at the social level and as technical infrastructure are being considered at this moment in Force11.)

Scholarly commoners are…

Members of these intentional communities, with the freedoms and responsibilities that their communities provide and demand. Commoners work for the benefit of the whole community and for the sustainability of its open, shared scholarly resources. An individual commoner may belong to several commons. It is the role and the goal of commoners to help these open, shared resources flourish.

Scholarly commoning is…

The practice (and an attitude) that commoners bring to the scholarly commons. It begins with a logic of abundance, and depends on an active culture of sharing. Commoning is the activity to build and sustain the commons through shared practice (thanks to Cameron Neylon for this wording). Scholarly commoning is also imbued with an ethos of scholarship/science (however defined). Scholarly commoning informs how science can be accomplished through the use of open, shared resources (open ideas, open data, open software, open workflows, open-access publishing with open review, etc.) inside commons, instead of through other types of economies.

Other ideas/questions:

Can a single object in one open repository be claimed as a resource by more than one commons?

Scholarship needs to be fearless. One role of academic tenure was to protect this condition. In the face of the neoliberal market, tenure has failed in this role. Can the commons provide this protection?

Someone noted that many data objects are “uncommon” objects that require knowledge and knowhow to use and share. Scholarly commons also maintain knowledge and knowhow.

Someone said that the data commons might just be a thousand ESIPs, each one stewarding its own collections, optimizing their value, and creating APIs to share them. Sounds pretty good to me! What does everybody think?