Talk given at OECD workshop on sustaining scholarly data infrastructures

1. Sustaining Scholarly Infrastructures
Through Collective Action
The Lessons that Olson Can Teach Us
@cameronneylon
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0068-716X

2. To read the paper search for
biorxiv neylon olson

4. • Collective (Public-Like) Goods are
difficult for large groups to
provision
• Small groups can work together
• Large groups can only succeed by
applying one of three special cases
• Oligopoly
• Non-collective goods as a side
effect
• Compulsory funding (taxation)

5. Ways of beating the problem…
1. Oligopoly: Generally of funders or publishers, there are too many
institutions. EuropePMC is an example.
2. Non-collective side-product: Needs to be a natural service or non-
collective good generated as part of public good provisioning. Very
few good examples in open data world and this is predictable,
failure often results in a turn to a subscription model eg TAIR
3. Compulsion: Either compulsory membership models (professional
certificationis an example) or top slicing/overheads models

6. Crossref phased through all three approaches
Crossref provides a public good in the form of freely accessible
bibliographic metadata and the infrastructure that supports it.
Three phases
1. Effective oligopoly: 5-7 publishers dominate the space and were
essentially able to act unilaterally to set up and support Crossref
2. Non-collective side benefit: Members join to be able to assign
DOIs and to gain the benefits of traffic through the referrer
3. Compulsory contribution: No (STM) publisher will be taken
seriously unless it is assigning Crossref DOIs. Membership is (close
to) effectively compulsory for a serious publisher.

7. Project
Infrastructure

8. Project
Infrastructure

9. Project
Infrastructure
“Find
a
sustainability
model”

10. Membership
Models
Subscriptions
Non-­‐collective
side-­‐product

11. Project
Infrastructure

12. No taxation without representation

13. • Broad coverage
• Stakeholder governed
• Non-discriminatory
• Transparent operations
• Cannot lobby
• Living will
• Incentivesto wind down
• Time-limitedfunds only
for time-limiteduses
• Generate a surplus
• Contingency fund
• Revenue from services
• Mission consistent
• Can be “forked”
• Open Source
• Open Data
• Available Data
• Patent non-assertion
Governance Financial sustainability Communityinsurance
Bilder G, Lin J, Neylon C 2015 Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure-­v1,
Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1314859

14. 1. Membership models are much less
applicable as a transitional model than we
would like (especially for open data)
2. If we accept a need to move to taxation
models then organisations will need to be
trusted by community

15. @cameronneylon
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0068-716X
Slides: http://bit.ly/2oa04BF