Abstract
This chapter will explain, why electronic knowledge resources in academia cannot exclusively be treated as private commodities, but can also be seen as public goods. After sketching a concept of public goods for a post-national, global society, three types of electronic knowledge resources are distinguished: scholarly publications, course materials, and academic software. With the help of practical examples, similarities between these resources are developed. Finally, it will be explained what advantages the status of public good for knowledge resources would have and how it could be achieved by the academic community.
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Notes
- 1.
 eScholarship Repository http://escholarship.org/.
- 2.
 Research Papers in Economics http://repec.org/.
- 3.
 Open Archive Initiative http://www.openarchives.org/.
- 4.
 Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resource Coalition (SPARC) http://www.arl.org/sparc/.
- 5.
 European Integration Online Papers http://eiop.or.at/eiop/index.php/eiop.
- 6.
 Public Library of Science (PLoS) http://www.plos.org/.
- 7.
 BioMed Central http://www.biomedcentral.com/.
- 8.
 ArXiv http://arxiv.org/.
- 9.
 Google Books http://books.google.com/.
- 10.
 Open Content Alliance http://www.opencontentalliance.org/.
- 11.
 MIT Open Course Ware http://ocw.mit.edu/.
- 12.
 Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/.
- 13.
 Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI) http://www.okiproject.org/.
- 14.
 Sakai Project http://www.sakaiproject.org/.
- 15.
 Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) http://www.merlot.org/.
- 16.
 Wikibooks http://www.wikibooks.org/.
- 17.
 Moodle http://moodle.org/.
- 18.
 Campus Source http://www.campussource.de/.
- 19.
 Blackboard http://www.blackboard.com/.
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Pfeffer, T. (2012). Preservation of Academic Knowledge Resources as Public Goods. In: Virtualization of Universities. Innovation, Technology, and Knowledge Management. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2065-1_4
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