In economic science, the tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action. The concept originated in an essay written in 1833 by the British economist William Forster Lloyd, who used a hypothetical example of the effects of unregulated grazing on common land in Great Britain and Ireland. The concept became widely known as the "tragedy of the commons" over a century later after an article written by Garrett Hardin in 1968.
Community management or common-pool resource management is the management of a common resource or issue by a community through the collective action of volunteers and stakeholders. The resource managed can be either material or informational. Examples include the management of common grazing and water rights; fisheries and open-source software. In the case of physical resources, community management strategies are frequently employed to avoid the tragedy of the commons and to encourage sustainability.
A public health journal is a scientific journal devoted to the field of public health, including epidemiology, biostatistics, and health care. Public health journals, like most scientific journals, are peer-reviewed. Public health journals are commonly published by health organizations and societies, such as the Bulletin of the World Health Organization or the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. Many others are published by a handful of large publishing corporations that includes Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer Science+Business Media, and Informa, each of which has many imprints. Many societies partner with such corporations to handle the work of producing their journals.
Open educational resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes.
Social peer-to-peer processes are interactions with a peer-to-peer dynamic. These peers can be humans or computers. Peer-to-peer (P2P) is a term that originated from the popular concept of the P2P distributed computer application architecture which partitions tasks or workloads between peers. This application structure was popularized by file sharing systems like Napster, the first of its kind in the late 1990s.
The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately. Commons can also be understood as natural resources that groups of people manage for individual and collective benefit. Characteristically, this involves a variety of informal norms and values employed for a governance mechanism. Commons can be also defined as a social practice of governing a resource not by state or market but by a community of users that self-governs the resource through institutions that it creates.
In economics, a common-pool resource (CPR) is a type of good consisting of a natural or human-made resource system, whose size or characteristics makes it costly, but not impossible, to exclude potential beneficiaries from obtaining benefits from its use. Unlike pure public goods, common pool resources face problems of congestion or overuse, because they are subtractable. A common-pool resource typically consists of a core resource, which defines the stock variable, while providing a limited quantity of extractable fringe units, which defines the flow variable. While the core resource is to be protected or nurtured in order to allow for its continuous exploitation, the fringe units can be harvested or consumed.
Elinor Claire "Lin" Ostrom was an American political economist whose work was associated with the New Institutional Economics and the resurgence of political economy. In 2009, she was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for her "analysis of economic governance, especially the commons", which she shared with Oliver E. Williamson. To date, she remains the first of only two women to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, the other being Esther Duflo.
Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) works with libraries worldwide to enable access to digital information for people in developing and transition countries. They are an international not-for-profit organisation based in Vilnius with a global network of partners.
The Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) is a registered non-profit organisation based in Anand, Gujarat, India working towards the ecological restoration and conservation of land and water resources in ecologically fragile, degraded and marginalised regions of the country, through concentrated and collective efforts of village communities.
The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) is a scholarly society dedicated to the advancement of knowledge about the former Soviet Union and Eastern and Central Europe. The ASEEES supports teaching, research, and publication relating to the peoples and territories within this area.
Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets. Digital curation establishes, maintains and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use. This is often accomplished by archivists, librarians, scientists, historians, and scholars. Enterprises are starting to use digital curation to improve the quality of information and data within their operational and strategic processes. Successful digital curation will mitigate digital obsolescence, keeping the information accessible to users indefinitely. Digital curation includes digital asset management, data curation, digital preservation, and electronic records management.
The term "knowledge commons" refers to information, data, and content that is collectively owned and managed by a community of users, particularly over the Internet. What distinguishes a knowledge commons from a commons of shared physical resources is that digital resources are non-subtractible; that is, multiple users can access the same digital resources with no effect on their quantity or quality.
Open science data or Open Research Data is a type of open data focused on publishing observations and results of scientific activities available for anyone to analyze and reuse. A major purpose of the drive for open data is to allow the verification of scientific claims, by allowing others to look at the reproducibility of results, and to allow data from many sources to be integrated to give new knowledge. While the idea of open science data has been actively promoted since the 1950s, the rise of the Internet has significantly lowered the cost and time required to publish or obtain data.
Open educational practices (OEP) is the use of Open educational Resources for teaching and learning in order to innovate the learning process. They are represented in teaching techniques that draw upon open technologies and high-quality open educational resources (OER) in order to facilitate collaborative and flexible learning. They may involve students participating in online, peer production communities within activities intended to support learning or more broadly, any context where access to educational opportunity through freely available online content and services is the norm. Such activities may include, the creation, use and repurposing of open educational resources and their adaptation to the contextual setting. OEP can also include the open sharing of teaching practices and aim "to raise the quality of education and training and innovate educational practices on an institutional, professional and individual level". The OEP community includes policy makers, managers/ administrators of organisations, educational professionals and learners. OEP are also viewed as the next phase in OER development that continues to transform 21st century learning and learners.
The Design Research Society (DRS), founded in the United Kingdom in 1966, is an international society for developing and supporting the interests of the design research community. The primary purpose of the DRS, as embodied in its first statement of rules, is to promote ‘the study of and research into the process of designing in all its many fields'. This established the intention of being an interdisciplinary learned society, taking a scholarly and domain independent view of the process of designing. Membership is open to anyone interested in design research, and members with established experience and a strong background in design research may apply to be elected as a DRS Fellow.
An open-access monograph is a scholarly monograph which is made freely available with a creative commons licence.
The National Coalition of Independent Scholars (NCIS) is the principal professional association for independent scholars. Incorporated in the USA but now with an international membership, NCIS is a non-profit organization that supports independent scholars, defined as someone who is actively pursuing knowledge in an academic or scientific discipline, without secure employment in or support from an academic institution. Independent scholars include unaffiliated scholars, adjunct professors and part-time faculty, graduate students, research professionals, artists, and curators. NCIS enables scholars working in the arts, humanities, social sciences and STEM fields to access and share resources, such as library access, and support, which are typically unavailable to researchers who are not affiliated with a university or other institution.
Open educational resources in Canada are the various initiatives related to open educational resources (OER) and open education established nationally and provincially in Canada, and with international collaboration.
Open access to scholarly communication in Germany has evolved rapidly since the early 2000s. Publishers Beilstein-Institut, Copernicus Publications, De Gruyter, Knowledge Unlatched, Leibniz Institute for Psychology Information, ScienceOpen, Springer Nature, and Universitätsverlag Göttingen belong to the international Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association.
