The development of information technology and universal networks creates new spheres of non-market exchanges. This leads to a de facto demonetizing of some activities that were previously the object of monetary transactions, or creates a
dual system where the same contents are accessible in both manners, through commercial transactions (generally with some added-value in comparison to non-market access) and by exchange between individual peers.
Scientific publishing is an example of a domain which is in the process of becoming entirely non-market on the access side, even though some publishers still cling to the belief of remaining monopoly dealers. As a result, it has to search for financing mechanisms for those parts of the scientific publication that remain essential to its aims: editorial selection, limited but real production costs (in par-ticular when paper publication is still deemed useful) and post-publication pro-cesses such as commenting and revision. As most research work being published is publicly funded, the natural financing solution would be to make these publish-ing costs part of the research fundpublish-ing. Part of this solution was implemented by the European R&D funding programs, when they decided to allow authors to claim back publication fees. However, the fees are reimbursed whatever their cost, and proprietary journals often charge three times more for their“open ac-cess” option (where the author pays to ensure access to their publication is open) than journals with open publishing models. This amounts to a significant public subsidy for proprietary models and is clearly unacceptable. Aside from this de-bate, there is also a need to provide complementary financing for the publication of results from unfunded or insufficiently funded researchers, and researchers in poorer countries or institutions. This has been a test case for pooling resources for the creation of knowledge commons. In the case of the Public Library of Science,10it is handled by a combination of support from foundations (in particu-lar the Open Society Foundations) and donations from individuals. This solution will probably not scale up as fast as the needs it covers, as open publishing is increasingly becoming the dominant model.
In the cultural domain, direct public funding is less dominant: though it plays an important role in financing creative activity in many countries, it is indirect for a large part, a typical example being the employment of artists in public educa-tional organizations. In fact, there would probably be strong opposition to a pre-dominant funding from governments towards, say, the expression of individuals in the public sphere, or towards news media, for fear that it would lead to forms of censorship or influence on contents. It is thus natural to seek a direct society-wide pooling of resources, where the role of government is to set up the system and to act as a trustee for its transparency and democratic governance. It is the route we have followed with the Creative Contribution proposal, which, as an eco-nomics construct, is best described as a government-initiated society-wide pooling of resources for the conditions of existence of the cultural, expressive and information commons.
It turns out that similar situations of having to finance the conditions of exis-tence of commons (by definition outside the scope of market transactions) are also found well beyond the domain of information and culture. For instance, while local community action can do a lot for managing environmental resources,
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some need to be maintained on a more global scale. One such example is the preservation of biodiversity among plants and genetic resources of agricultural or medical interest. The industrialization and standardization of agriculture have led to a strong reduction in biodiversity, directly through the reduction in the number of cultivated varieties, and indirectly through the effects on natural biodiversity of agricultural landscaping, weedkillers and pesticides. In reaction, movements for a better preservation of vegetal biodiversity gained momentum. Two – probably complementary– forms of actions for this preservation exist: preservation storage of vegetal varieties in seed banks, funded by governments under the umbrella of international organizations, and the decentralized in situ reproductive manage-ment of biodiversity by farmers.11Government action has, for a long time, de-incentivised the latter by installing costly certification procedures for seeds, whose requirements stood contrary to in-situ biodiversity preservation12and by requiring certification for the commercialization or even the non-market ex-change of seeds. Fortunately, grassroots farmer and amateur gardener efforts countered these trends, and we recently witnessed a return to a larger set of vari-eties in particular for fruits and vegetables. Pharmaceutical and cosmetic compa-nies as well as agro-food compacompa-nies themselves are now conscious of the value of global biodiversity preservation, even if they would rather free-ride on it, proprie-tarizing its most valuable components when industrializing them. There is a clear need to incentivise the in situ preservation and development of biodiversity, which turns out to be an activity to which many can contribute and from which all ben-efit. Some forms of this activity (biodiversity inventories, home gardening) have their own motivations and do not need further financial incentives. Others, such as the reproduction of seeds through the culture of cereals and other plants are costly and a societal pooling of resources would be useful.
Similar situations also arise in the management of social public goods such as health: everyone can contribute to a better knowledge of health conditions or problems encountered in the use of drugs. Furthermore, large-scale pooling of resources to search for treatments for rare or neglected diseases is already a rea-lity, bringing together individual donations, governments and private~funds.
A specificity of information and knowledge commons is that the financing schemes they require must not create transaction costs within the flows of infor-mation and knowledge. In this sense, they are “purer” commons than physical commons or social public goods, where some transaction costs in economic in-centives are acceptable, because there exist anyway other transactions to which they can be attached.
Within the landscape we have just sketched out, a new vision of schemes such as the Creative Contribution arises: they can be seen as, and could actually be-come, a healthy form of specialized currency creation. To see how this works, let us assume that we have an idea of how much new investment occurs every year to produce components of cultural commons in one country. We then divide this
amount into equal parts for each individual, and distribute (virtually) the corre-sponding sum to each person above a certain age, empowering them to allocate it according to their usage (to reward works) and their preferences (to finance pro-duction). “Hang on a second,” you might say. “The Creative Contribution will come out of our pockets, not out of some virtually distributed pot of money that we receive.” This is true at the moment, but the alternative model we just outlined might be the one of the future. For it to become acceptable, there is one condi-tion: the resources must be pooled among a community of peers, and the amount that leaks out of the system (e.g. in speculative investments) must remain limited.
The annual distribution of individual credits must not lead to monetary inflation.
Inflation would rise if too much of this currency ends up distributed to some individuals or organizations, over and above what they need to live on and to put together meaningful creative projects.
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Implementation
9 Organization and complementary policy measures
The best proposals can turn into a bureaucratic nightmare, or fail to serve their intended aims, if their implementation is inadequate. The challenge is made harder by the fact that organizational issues are no fun. Internet users and crea-tive people (two very much overlapping categories) are not particularly keen on creating organizations, specially not when they have to deal with the large-scale management of money. They often create ad hoc organizations that handle the complex logistics of a project, or art and advocacy collectives. They are often en-trepreneurs, engineers of these lightweight virtual corporations which have re-cently received some legal recognition in a Vermont law (Bollier 2008). But sitting on steering committees and management boards is not the activity of choice for most of them, and they ignore or outsource (when they can afford it) most of the interface with collective management organizations, except to complain about the misgovernance of the latter. To involve Internet users and a much wider set of producers and contributors to works in the management of the Creative Contri-bution, we will have to use innovative means.
A non-fiction writer and analyst must also show some caution here. Organiza-tions are not created, or even designed, by writing books. The organization of the Creative Contribution will differ from country to country. Moreover, putting it in place must be the first step in a participatory process, not the execution of a set plan. To cope with these challenges, we limit this chapter to the description of the key components that will have to be present in any organization for the Creative Contribution or a similar system. We then outline how the governance of a parti-cularly difficult decision (the split of rewards to different media) could be handled. And, finally we stress the need for a number of complementary policy measures that would maximize the benefits of the Creative Contribution.