Education Commons^™

A Financial Option For The Modern University Press, Thomas Bacher

Thomas Bacher

Harvard professor Yochai Benkler has written a number of papers on the prospect of peer production of information. The digital environment can provide an avenue for many disciplines to lower the system cost of information. Viewing scholarly information as a public good changes the nature of participation. In a smaller discipline like Cultural Anthropology, for example, could a decentralized, peer-run system alter the way constituents cooperate to produce openly-accessible, quality research and provide a template for other disciplines? In other words, can the academy maximize social technologies like crowdsourcing to create content by having interested parties donate money, time, and …