Background and Rationale of the Conference

The rapid advances in digital technologies and networks over the past two decades have significantly altered and improved the ways that data and information can be produced, disseminated, managed, and used, both in science and in many other spheres of human endeavor, and have created unprecedented opportunities for accelerating the progress of science and innovation. These developments are part of the emerging broader movement in support of formal and informal “peer production” and global dissemination of information by mobilizing the cooperation of distributed science and knowledge communities in open networked environments. Indeed, as recognized increasingly in the literature, the emerging economics of science in the digital environment can be seen as a complex mix of social sharing and exchange in communities of peers as a modality of production, along with public support and private appropriation as an incentive for translating research results into new commercial applications.

This conference – held within the context of the EU-funded project COMMUNIA, the European Thematic Network on the Digital Pubic Domain - aims to bring together leading people from a number of international scientific research communities, social science researchers and science, technology and innovation policy analysts, to discuss the rationale, policy support and practical feasibility of arrangements designed to emulate key public domain conditions for collaborative research. Initiatives and policies have been proposed that go beyond “open access” to published research findings by aiming to facilitate more effective and extensive (global) sharing of not only data and information, but research facilities, tools, and materials. There is thus a need to examine a number of these proposals’ conceptual foundations from the economic and legal perspectives and to analyze the roles of the public domain and contractually constructed commons in facilitating sharing of scientific and technical data, information and materials. But it is equally important to examine the available evidence about actual experience with concrete organizational initiatives in different areas of scientific and technological research, and to devise appropriate, contextually relevant methods of assessing effectiveness and identifying likely unintended and dysfunctional outcomes.