Sustaining Scholarly Infrastructures through Collective Action: The Lessons that Olson can Teach us

Abstract

The infrastructures that underpin scholarship and research, including repositories, curation systems, aggregators, indexes and standards, are public goods. Finding sustainability models to support them is a challenge due to free-loading, where someone who does not contribute to the support of an infrastructure nonetheless gains the benefit of it. The work of Mancur Olson (1965) suggests that there are only three ways to address this for large groups: compelling all potential users, often through some form of taxation, to support the infrastructure; providing non-collective (club) goods to contributors that are created as a side-effect of providing the collective good; or implementing mechanisms that lower the effective number of participants in the negotiation (oligopoly).In this paper, I use Olson's framework to analyse existing scholarly infrastructures and proposals for the sustainability of new infrastructures. This approach provides some important insights. First, it illustrates that the problems of sustainability are not merely ones of finance but of political economy, which means that focusing purely on financial sustainability in the absence of considering governance principles and community is the wrong approach. The second key insight this approach yields is that the size of the community supported by an infrastructure is a critical parameter. Sustainability models will need to change over the life cycle of an infrastructure with the growth (or decline) of the community. In both cases, identifying patterns for success and creating templates for governance and sustainability could be of significant value. Overall, this analysis demonstrates a need to consider how communities, platforms, and finances interact and suggests that a political economic analysis has real value.

The Benefits, Barriers, and Risks of Big Team Science

“…This problem recurs so frequently because scientific organizations are typically public-minded: they wish to provide a public good at little or no cost. Yet, this very public-mindededness invites freeridership -people who will use the organization's service but who are either unwilling or unable to support the organization financially (Neylon, 2017). This dynamic also threatens big team science institutions.…”

“…The second step to mitigating this risk involves creating and following a sustainability plan (for an example, see Forscher & IJzerman, 2021) that maps out how the institution will generate the funds necessary to maintain itself. This sustainability plan can follow one of the funding models that have led to sustainable funding for other large scientific institutions (Neylon, 2017). These funding models will likely involve either creating a system that "taxes" all beneficiaries of the big team science infrastructure by, say, imposing membership dues rather as scientific society does, or, alternatively providing the infrastructure as a byproduct of selling another service.…”

The Benefits, Barriers, and Risks of Big-Team Science

“…This problem recurs so frequently because scientific organizations are typically public-minded: they wish to provide a public good at little or no cost. Yet, this very public-mindedness invites free-ridership -people who will use the organization's service but who are either unwilling or unable to support the organization financially (Neylon, 2017). This dynamic also threatens big team science organizations.…”

JLSC Board Editorial 2019

“…John Wenzler (2017) applied Olson's work to academic libraries, arguing that it is not possible for us to achieve our scholarly communication goals. Cameron Neylon (2017), in a more nuanced application of Olson's work to scholarly communication, shows that in some cases the collective action problem can be overcome. But what Neylon shows is how small groups can act and how collective action can be successful when some members of the group receive a benefit that they value enough to pay for the collective good.…”