Creating a Transnational Knowledge Commons to Address the Global Polycrisis

Humanity faces numerous deeply interconnected systemic risks—a global polycrisis. We need economic institutions that the produce the knowledge required to address this polycrisis at the lowest cost, maximize its benefits, and distribute those benefits fairly. Knowledge improves through use; its value is maximized when it is freely available. IPRs, a form of monopoly, direct knowledge production towards market goods, raise the cost of doing research, and reduce the benefits by price-rationing access. Universities pay professors to create new knowledge and publish their findings in for-profit journals which sell access back to the Universities. Governments fund corporations and academics to develop new knowledge with public money, then allow them to patent that knowledge for private gain. Most US universities spend more money acquiring IPRs than they earn from them. A single university could initiate a transnational knowledge commons (TKC) by mandating that all scientific knowledge it produces be made open access on the condition that any subsequent improvements also be open access. Other Universities and research institutes from around the world would be encouraged to join. As a side benefit, a TKC would help stimulate the transnational cooperation, reciprocity and trust required to collectively manage human impacts on global ecosystems