Reclaiming the Commons

Public Library of Science

http://www.plos.org

The Public Library of Science is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. All material on the site, whether submitted to or created by the Public Library of Science, is published under an open access license that allows unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Read more about Public Library of Science...

Practical Farmers of Iowa

http://www.practicalfarmers.org

Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI) is a non-profit, educational organization that began in 1985 and now has over 700 members in Iowa and neighboring states. The group works to research, develop and promote profitable, ecologically sound and community-enhancing approaches to agriculture. It carries out diverse programs to assist farmers with both production and marketing needs, to raise public awareness of where food comes from and how it is grown, and to educate youth about agriculture and the environment. Read more about Practical Farmers of Iowa...

Ithaca Hours

http://www.ithacahours.org

Ithaca Hours is a local currency system that promotes local economic strength and community self-reliance to support economic and social justice, ecology, community participation and human aspirations in and around Ithaca, New York. Ithaca Hours help to keep money local, building the Ithaca economy. It also builds community pride and connections. Over 900 participants publicly accept Ithaca HOURS for goods and services. Read more about Ithaca Hours...

Internet Archive

http://www.archive.org

The Internet Archive is a non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the organization has since grown to include texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages. Read more about Internet Archive...

Creative Commons

http://www.creativecommons.org

Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that has developed “creative commons” licenses to provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators. The group has built upon the "all rights reserved" concept of traditional copyright to offer a voluntary "some rights reserved" approach. All of the group's tools are free. Read more about Creative Commons...

Yes! Magazine—Reclaiming the Commons issue (summer 2001)

This issue explores the commons from a variety of perspectives. As one of the articles' authors, Jonathan Rowe, notes, “It is the vast realm that is the shared heritage of all of us that we typically use without toll or price. The atmosphere and oceans, languages and cultures, the stores of human knowledge and wisdom, the informal support systems of community, the peace and quiet that we crave, the genetic building blocks of life — these are all aspects of the commons.”

Read more about Yes! Magazine—Reclaiming the Commons issue (summer 2001)...

Who Owns Native Culture?

This website, designed as a supplement to the book of the same name (published by Harvard Press, 2003), also provides a wide range of resources for understanding current debates about the legal status of indigenous art, music, folklore, biological knowledge, and sacred places, as well as the ways those issues intersect with current debates regarding the commons, the public domain and intellectual property.

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Team Works (Los Altos, CA)

Founded in 2004, TeamWorks is a worker-owned cooperative business. Every permanent worker in the company is an owner-member with a financial stake in the business' success and its decision-making. TeamWorks consists of two businesses, one of which provides house cleaning and concierge services on the San Francisco peninsula while the other provides business support services and is involved in starting new TeamWorks sites.

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Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society

Founded by law professor Lawrence Lessig (author of Free Culture), The Center for Internet and Society (CIS) is a public interest technology law and policy program that brings together scholars, academics, legislators, students, programmers, security researchers, and scientists to study the interaction of new technologies and the law and to examine how the synergy between the two can either promote or harm public goods like free speech, privacy, public commons, diversity, and scientific inquiry.

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SPARC Open Access Newsletter

The SPARC Open Access Newsletter is a monthly newsletter by Peter Suber, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Earlham University, offering news and analysis of the open-access movement —the worldwide movement to disseminate scientific and scholarly research literature online, free of charge and free of unnecessary licensing restrictions. The SPARC newsleter was launched in July 2003 to continue Peter's Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter (March 2001 - September 2002). Back issues, as well as Peter Suber's blog, are available on this website.

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Robyn Van En Center (Wilson College-Chambersville, PA)

The Robyn Van En Center provides a national resource center about Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) for people across the nation and around the world. The Robyn Van En Center also offers outreach and works to gain publicity about CSA farms in order to benefit community farmers and consumers everywhere.

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Public Trust Doctrine on Natural and Cultural Resources Page

The Public Trust Doctrine Page, maintained by the Albany, New York-based law firm of P.M.Bray LLC, provides a range of information about public trust law, with a focus on public policy, research and application in natural and cultural resources planning and management.

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Natural Assets Project, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

The Natural Assets Project examines the scope for reducing poverty through asset building in the form of natural capital. Natural assets include both environmental sources and sinks. "Sources" include raw materials, renewable and non-renewable, such as forests, fisheries, soil, and minerals. "Sinks" are the capacities of media such as air and water to absorb and decompose the wastes from production and consumption. The institute aims to design pro-poor natural asset- building strategies to further its goals of both conversation and environmental justice or equity.

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Jay Walljasper

A speaker, writer and editor, Jay Walljasper covers a wide variety of topics on his website, with particular specialties in community and urban issues, travel, sustainability, cultural commentary, and the commons.

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International Association for the Study of the Commons

The International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC), founded in 1989, is a nonprofit association devoted to understanding and improving institutions for the management of environmental resources that are (or could be) held or used collectively by communities in developing or developed countries.

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Free Expression Policy Project (Brennan School, New York University)

The Free Expression Policy Project (FEPP), founded in 2000, provides research and advocacy on free speech, copyright, and media democracy issues. The website contains a wide range of reports on the information commons and related issues, as well as policy reports, press releases, fact sheets, and legal briefs.

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Digital Library of the Commons

The Digital Library of the Commons is a gateway to the international literature on the commons. This site contains an author-submission portal; an archive of full-text articles, papers, and dissertations; the Comprehensive Bibliography of the Commons; a Keyword Thesaurus; and links to relevant reference sources on the study of the commons.

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David Bollier

A Senior Fellow at the Norman Lear Center at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, co-founder and board member of Public Knowledge, a Washington policy advocacy organization dedicated to protecting the information commons, and author of three books on the commons, David Bollier further explores issues regarding the commons on his new website. A research resource, Bollier's site provides podcasts, reports, organization links and other news regarding the commons.

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Conference on the Public Domain (Duke Law School)

This website contains a collection of papers from a November 2001 conference, which center on the study of the concept of the “public domain”—its importance, its history, its role in science, art, and in the building of the Internet, as well as how it is similar to and different from the idea of a commons. Topics covered include the human genome, appropriationist art (such as hip-hop), the production of scientific data, and the architecture of communications networks.

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