Design Principles for Creating the Open Scholarly Commons from Elinor Ostrom

Abstract

This paper looks at the work of Elinor Ostrom, particularly her book Governing the Commons, and applies it to the problem of designing the open scholarly commons. Ostrom's work looks commons that have been successful at overcoming collective action problems. While the open scholarly commons differs in some important ways from the commons Ostrom studied, some lessons can be learned from her work.