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Abstract
This article addresses the emerging field of the knowledge commons in relation to the challenges of international development. It reviews the history of academic knowledge and innovation since the Enlightenment, its evolution and current trends, with the purpose of exploring the future of the knowledge commons. Assuming that knowledge is the most important resource in the twenty-first century, the intention of this article is to map the conditions necessary to take advantage of this resource. What are the barriers to accessing and using the global common pool of knowledge that is currently being generated? The supply and the demand sides of the knowledge sharing equation are reviewed to understand their particularities and trends. Particular attention is given to the demand side of this equation in order to identify the obstacles that prevent people from less developed countries from taking full advantage of this fast-growing resource.
Notes
1. An initial version of the article was presented in 2011 as an essay in the ELC doctorate program of Fielding Graduate University
2. Although it is very frequent to understand knowledge and information as different levels of complexity, I will assume that explicit knowledge, when it is outside the human brain, is expressed through information. So, the idea is that information can have different levels of complexity. It may express data or sets of data, and also more complex subjects such as knowledge and ideas. The conceptualisation behind this definition is that tacit knowledge expresses itself through action, as an operational skill, and explicit knowledge, knowledge that was codified, is expressed through information.
3. Simon Kuznets, originally, used the term ‘tested knowledge’. Mokyr coined the term ‘useful knowledge’, referring to the same concept of tested knowledge, developed by Kuznets.
4. I am not suggesting here that all types of knowledge or epistemologies are equivalent. It is impossible to understand modernity without the development of the methods for submitting hypotheses to empirical tests, and for evaluating logical consistency, and the social institutions of knowledge creation such as journals, peer review, academic research, and scientific societies. I am saying that for the economic and social usefulness of knowledge, features of knowledge as an object have more relevance than its epistemology.
5. Mokyr defines prescriptive knowledge as the set of techniques related exclusively to manipulating nature. However, I am expanding the concept of prescriptive knowledge to include the manipulation of social institutions. The reason behind this conceptual expansion is that, for less developed countries that are far from the edge of scientific and technological advancements, social technologies are critical areas of innovation. Social technologies are required to assimilate the new (physical) technologies that are being created in developed countries. To work with social technologies, it is necessary to have a concept of prescriptive knowledge that includes the manipulation of social institutions.
6. Analysing the challenges of ecosystem conservation, Hammond et al. (Citation2008) have concluded that the fragmentation of knowledge undermines ecologists’ efforts, and explains an important part of the failures of their conservational efforts. The knowledge that is accessible to some ecological groups is incomplete and fragmented, and this limitation conspires against the effectiveness of their efforts.
7. My experience of working with communities in the highlands of Peru confirms the importance of general, mostly external, knowledge to grasp the systemic nature of the problems they were facing.
8. Reading and writing still remained a privilege of a small social segment for over five thousand years. It was the expansion of public education (an admirable social technology), in the nineteenth century, that made reading and writing a general human attribute, including millions and billions of people into the formerly exclusive club of readers and writers.
9. In communities of practice (Wenger et al. Citation2002), most of the knowledge deployed by the community of practice is embedded in the brains of their members.
10. Thinking of the conditions of the global South, this set of criteria may deserve further analysis. For example: are they sufficient, or are some critical aspects of the knowledge commons being missed? Under which conditions, are these criteria adequate? Which criteria should receive priority, in which situation? Which actors could become, unintentionally, excluded from having access to the knowledge commons by this set of criteria?
11. Another way to estimate the increase in prescriptive knowledge is the improvement in total factor productivity (TFP). However, the total factor productivity, TFP, measures the impact of innovation in the productivity of an economy, not only the generation of new technologies. As Mokyr (2002a) has explained, non-academic knowledge plays an important role in supporting economic activities and innovation. One part of this knowledge is tacit or barely externalized in the form of lessons learned, dispersed and invisible inside people's minds. Another part of this knowledge may be documented in private documents of companies and institutions, which are not so accessible to external people.
12. In 1907, there were roughly 800,000 academic articles (accumulated from 1650 to that date), and in 2008 this number had increased to roughly 50,000,000 (Jinha Citation2010b). The growth of academic articles in 1907 was approximately 45,000 (800,000*5.6%), and in 2008, it was 1.6 million (50,000,000*3.2%). Although, these rough estimations may have errors of 20% or 30%, they do not change the magnitude of the figures.
13. The importance of social technologies is hard to overestimate. The second industrial revolution would not be possible without social technologies such as the research lab, the industrial factory and the production line.
14. In an early phase of the movement, the mathematician Andrew Michael Odlysko (Citation1994) envisioned the emergence of online, through Internet, alternative ways of diffusing academic works. Odlysko imagined a future when online publishing of academic articles has become mainstream, displacing old-fashioned paper printing. Although Internet publishing evolved differently from the vision of Odlysko, his idea of open access has become more and more important.
15. The metadata research of Hajjem et al. (Citation2005) was comprehensive, covering 1,307,038 articles for the time-span of 12 years: 1992 to 2003, exploring the citation impact over 10 disciplines such as biology, health, education, psychology, economics, sociology, business, administration, law and sociology.
16. The findings of Florida do not mean that people living in less developed countries lack creativity. Staying alive, free, safe and healthy in some countries, requires a huge amount of creativeness. However, the economic value generated by that creativeness is not the same as in developed countries.
17. Most of the existing metadata refers to academic articles that are published in English, or with an abstract in English. Particularly underestimated in current metadata are publications from Asia. The annual growth rate of academic journals on science and engineering in China can be estimated between 12% and 16% (NSB Citation2010) but its representation in English written articles is still invisible using current searching tools. According to OpenDOAR (Citation2011) in the Open Access segments of academic articles, 54% of all articles are written in English, and only six other languages have more than 2.0% of participation in the academic global pie. They are Spanish, 7.2%, German, 6.4%, Japanese, 4.9%, French, 4.3%, Portuguese, 3.6%, and Chinese, 2.6%. All together, these six languages total 29% of open access academic production. So, English and the following six languages total 83% of the open access academic articles worldwide, and all the other languages account for only 17%. In open access academic literature, power law is the pattern of language concentration. Considering that the open access movement is an emergent phenomenon that concentrates mostly on open-minded and innovative researchers, it is likely that the state of language distributions in traditional academic literature is more concentrated than these figures of OpenDOAR. Indeed, with respect to academic articles in general, not only open access articles, the concentration in English is higher than in the open access movement. Clarke et al. (Citation2007) have found that in the subject of health 96.5% of the academic literature was in English and only 3.5% in other idioms, with German being the second one. Larsen et al. (2010) concludes: ‘western science were over-represented; whereas small countries, non-western countries, and journals published in non-Roman scripts were under-represented’ (p. 596). Although, the coverage of the Thomson ISI Index may include articles in other languages, it covers exclusively those articles whose abstract is in English. Because English is so dominant in academic literature, those who do not master English and its use in academic literature are excluded from the global flow of scientific knowledge.
18. Although knowledge is non-rival, physical artefacts containing knowledge, such as books, tapes and CDs, are rival. Museums and libraries are full of these types of artefacts.
19. The Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework of Hess and Ostrom (Citation2007) for the knowledge commons approaches is an adaptation of the IAD framework developed by Ostrom (Citation2003) with the purpose creating governance and management systems effective for avoiding the depletion of a natural resource commons. It approaches, predominantly, the supply side of the knowledge commons equation. The open access movement is successfully addressing the access barriers that come from the supply side such as quality, preservation, costs, and metadata.
20. Donald Waters (Citation2007) raised the concern about the low level of endurance of digital sources of scholarly articles. Reviewing literature in the field, he has found that the percentage of inactive Internet references two years after citation was 23%, and seven years after citation, the percentage of inactive ones was over 50%. These findings evidence a real problem of instability of digital sources on the Internet. However, Clay Shirky (Citation2008) has found that, once a document is uploaded on the Internet, it is almost impossible to eliminate all its copies.
21. The destruction of the Library of Alexandria by Julius Ceasar in 48 BC and the fall of Constantinople by the Ottomans in 1453 have meant the definitive destruction of single copies of important Greek cultural heritage. At those times, to make copies were quite expensive and to protect them from the obscurantism was a real challenge. The increase in the number of copies of documents, enabled by movable type printing and now by digital technologies, has become a kind of insurance against knowledge destruction.
22. Demand for the knowledge commons is quite different from the natural resource commons. For the natural resources commons, the primary purpose of management is the preservation of the resource system, via a controlled use. In the supply-demand equation of natural resources, the protection of the supply side of the equation commands management. The leading objective, when managing natural resources commons, such as fish, water, and timber, is to guarantee the continuity of the supply over time, it is the sustainability of the resource pools for current and future generations. Who can be granted access to a natural resources commons? For the rivalrous condition of natural resources, there are a limited number of users who can appropriate the resource units. That number is limited by the capacity of nature to restore the original conditions of the resource pool. Technology may influence the number of potential users that can appropriate resource units, but beyond a threshold, nature cannot restore the resource pool. So, before the system reaches that threshold, the extraction of resource units has to be reduced. Indeed, an important policy is the definition, identification and quantification of the quantity of resource units that users can extract from of a natural resource pool. For digital knowledge commons, the issues are quite different. Knowledge is a non-rivalrous commodity so there is no intrinsic limit to the number of ideas that can be extracted from a knowledge pool, or for the number of potential users of those ideas. The access and use of the knowledge stored in digital artefacts does not generate erosion, and the risk of the total depletion of artefacts in the knowledge pool on the Internet is quite low. As the Internet has already proved, as more copies are made of a digital document, the greater the likelihood becomes of its preservation. The limit for accessing a digital knowledge commons is given by the technical features of the facilities, not by the features of the resource pool in itself. Although a digital knowledge pool may suffer from free-riding, from people who want to appropriate or give unfair use to other people's creativity, in most cases that opportunistic behaviour does not exclude others from using the same artefact or idea. These are important differences of the knowledge commons from natural resources commons: non-rivalrous, continuing growth, unlikely to be depleted, decreasing access cost, and expanding outreach of access facilities. As technology evolves, the number of people who can access a knowledge reservoir will become higher and higher. In addition to this trend, the access costs to the facilities, artefacts and ideas are decreasing every day. Assuming that knowledge will keep on growing with no foreseeable limit, and that the open access movement is going to succeed, the supply side of the (digital) knowledge commons equation has a great future.
23. Motivation is a precondition for engaging in any process of knowledge building. The sources of motivation to engage in knowledge building may be diverse. Awareness about the need of external knowledge is one of them. Foreseeable positive outcomes, self-confidence in local capacities, and possible alliances to expand access to knowledge and improve local capacities are other sources of motivation.
24. For those cultures and set of religious beliefs that do not feel adequately represented by modern knowledge, the situation is particularly difficult. They feel that most external knowledge is framed in a way that threatens their cultural heritage. However, they also feel that the aspirations of their new generations cannot be fulfilled exclusively relying in their traditional knowledge. Finding positive synergies between these diverse ways of conceptualising reality and knowledge is a challenge for anyone interested in protecting and developing the cultural heritage of humanity.
25. In Latin America, I could observe important segments of professionals who have strong ideological beliefs (about political, social and economic subjects) that induce them to underestimate the relevance of becoming well informed about new interpretations and conceptual approaches that are being generated in those fields. When they feel the need to become informed, they are not inclined to read the original authors, preferring to read interpretations that were developed by authors with whom they share ideological inclinations.
26. I treated the issue of language in the supply side of knowledge sharing. However, it also greatly influences the demand side. People who do not feel comfortable reading in English will not look for information in that language. Socially or cognitively isolated people will not look for information they need only because they do not know of its existence. Indeed cognitive isolation may be a more important variable preventing knowledge access than the digital and language divides. I will come back to this topic below.
27. Firms have been studying absorptive capacity with the purpose of increasing their innovative capacity. Firms have found that absorptive capacity is key for innovation and that innovation is key for competitiveness. This same causal chain is valid for professionals and communities, both in developed and in less developed countries. As Mokyr (2002b) has explained in detail, if the epistemic base for innovation is too narrow the innovative capacity becomes undermined. The absorptive capacity is necessary to enhance the epistemic base of innovative initiatives.
28. The improvement of local absorptive capacity is critical for development, but falls beyond the scope of this article.
29. In situations of complexity and uncertainty, it is better to have more than one person playing the role of an interface to capture the diverse dimensions of the complexity of external knowledge.
30. The terminology and the structure of academic knowledge make it more complex for those who are not familiar with that type of presentation. This is an area where interfaces may play an important role. Gapminder.org has shown how the graphical presentation of data can make relevant patterns much easier to see and analyse than a simple matrix of numbers.
31. There are other types of knowledge communities. However, these three ones are enough to illustrate the issues related to the social nature of knowledge generation.
32. When analysing the demand for knowledge, it is possible to look at individuals, communities and the whole society and their access, assimilation and application of knowledge. In this paper I gave priority to the perspective of communities. The premise for this decision is that currently only communities can hold the knowledge required to develop any theoretical or technical field.
33. Outliers, people endowed with extraordinary intellects and deep feeling of independence can get beyond their cognitive context and generate breakthroughs that change the way a field is understood. Thales, using theorems, strongly influenced the future of mathematics; Galileo, using the scientific method, transformed the future of science; Newton started the systematic development of in physics; Darwin re-conceptualized evolution, etc.
34. Originally, I felt tempted to generalise the concept of epistemic communities toward the concept of thought collective of Fleck. But, considering that epistemic communities already have a traditional definition, developed by Haas, I concluded that the use of the same term for two notions could generate confusion. Then, I decided to use the term ‘knowledge community’ as a generic notion of any group of people whose main purpose is to work together to generate knowledge, and do some precisions on how this term should be understood. In this sense, thought collectives, epistemic communities and communities of practice are particular forms of knowledge communities.
35. Originally, John Ruggie (Citation1975) started using the concept of epistemic community for international issues. Ruggie conceptualised epistemic communities based on the concept of ‘episteme’ of Michel Foucault as a particular way of understanding reality, and defined epistemic communities as ‘interrelated roles which grow up around an episteme’ (as cited by Haas 1992, p. 27). Operationally, episteme can be understood as the set of beliefs about reality and knowledge that underlies a particular way of knowing, a particular way of generating reliable knowledge. Building upon Ruggie's ideas, Haas (1992) developed the concept of epistemic communities to apply to groups of experts in international issues such as financial stability, wars, conflicts, nuclear threats and ecological problems.
36. Comparing the patterns of the research work of physicists in high-energy physics and biologists in molecular biology, Knorr-Cetina (Citation1999) came up with the notion of epistemic cultures. She defined epistemic cultures as ‘those amalgams of arrangements and mechanisms – bonded through affinity, necessity and historical coincidence – which, in a given field, make up how we know what we know’ (as cited by Mork et al. Citation2008, p. 15). The set of epistemic beliefs, methods, techniques, equipment and tools should be considered as part of the mechanisms for knowing of those communities of scientists. Although Knorr-Cetina developed the concept of epistemic culture specifically for scientific-research communities, carried out under laboratory conditions, her notion can be expanded to include the work of knowledge generation carried out by experts in any knowledge community. Combining the Knorr-Cetina concept of epistemic culture, the Ruggie and Haas notion of epistemic communities, we can infer that epistemic communities share common epistemic cultures, and those epistemic cultures shape their particular way of acquiring and generating knowledge.
37. The Delphi Method also draws on expert knowledge to address complex subjects, but takes expert knowledge as an input inside another methodological approach.
38. This universal knowledge pool is not free from controversy. Many social groups do not feel that their conceptions and epistemic beliefs are represented by the current standard procedures for generating trustworthy knowledge. Most indigenous communities do not agree with the predominant procedures of scientists and academics, and feel their wealth of knowledge to be misinterpreted and undervalued. Some schools of thought, stressing the social character of knowledge construction, call for a more open dialogue among people with diverse epistemic beliefs. Pseudo-science is also abundant in the media and Internet, and shows no signal that it will be less ubiquitous in the coming decades.