A framework for analyzing the sustainability of peer produced science commons

Contemporary research and development settings are increasingly collaborative and cooperative. Collaborative in the sense that they bring together experts from different scientific and technical cultures in order to address grand challenge science problems (e.g. climate change). Cooperative in the sense that the research objects produced by and used in these collaborations are broadly shared. Successful long-term collaborations aren't an accident - they require purposeful coordination, clear communication, and adjustments made to both human and technical infrastructures over time. Similarly, successful longterm cooperation requires the ability to design governance and enforce rules related to access, use, and ownership over shared resources. Traditional approaches to the governance of scientific research struggle to accommodate these novel forms of collaboration and cooperation. For example, - A marketplace model creates individual property rights through limited monopolies, and - A state-based model develops regulatory policies based on a single centralized authority. A third model, the commons, mixes elements of both the market and the state in providing a broad framework for cooperative resource sharing. The commons has proven to be an effective governance strategy for sustaining shared environmental resource systems, such as fisheries, pastures, and forests. This dissertation explores the commons as a governance model for sustaining shared resources in cooperative scientific research settings. It asks how governance models used in cooperative research settings change over time and how,in practice, those models differ between domains of knowledge production. The relationship between sustainability, cooperation, and governance is explored through two sets of studies: - A longitudinal case study of the International Comprehensive Ocean and Atmosphere (ICOADS), a collaborative project in climate science, is developed to give an account of how a governance model evolves over time. - Drawing upon previously completed case studies of governance in astronomy, biomedical, and genomic research settings, a comparative account is developed to show how governance differs between domains of knowledge production. In conducting these studies, an empirical framework is developed for analyzing different characteristics of a governance model. A number of concepts from sociotechnical systems development are also addressed, including the peering of provision and production activities in contemporary research settings, polycentric models of governance, and the emergence of new types of commons models, including the knowledge commons. The results of this dissertation demonstrate that analytical frameworks (similar to those used in socioecological systems) can produce reliable empirical data about sustainability in a sociotechnical realm. In turn this data can be used for a comparative study of sustainability in the sociotechnical systems used by contemporary science research and development. The results of this dissertation also hold a number of important implications for science and technology policy, including the efficacy of using a standardized fra