Now, the Commons

As the Journal of Peer Production reaches its tenth issue, it is timely to reflect on what it set out to do, what it has achieved, and what it should do next. The Journal of Peer Production represents an attempt to emulate FOSS by circumventing the academic press system, where researchers do all the work – conceiving and disseminating calls for papers, producing and documenting research, selecting contributions, writing up research, etc – and are ‘paid’ in the form of 60-day free subscriptions to for-profit journals which their university libraries already subscribe to, at exorbitant rates. In contrast, consider the core principles of science first identified by Robert Merton in 1942: universalism, disinterestedness, organised scepticism, and communism (later changed to communalism). ‘The communism of the scientific ethos’, wrote Merton, ‘is incompatible with the definition of technology as “private property” in a capitalistic economy’ (275).