In “Sustaining Scholarly Infrastructures through Collective Action: The Lessons that Olson Can Teach Us,” Cameron Neylon meditates on how best to enable sustainability for largescale scholarly communication infrastructure. Neylon’s goal is to explore “how we can sustain shared platform systems that support scholarly communities through the collection, storage, and transmission of shared resources” (n.p.), and he provides a number of examples of scholarly infrastructures their funding models. Based on political economy literature and by comparing these initiatives, Neylon comes to the conclusion that a smaller governance body coordinating the development of scholarly infrastructure would be valuable, as it would put into place a reasonable number of decision makers to guide collective action; since scholarly communication encompasses so many thousands of institutions and actors, it would be nearly impossible to coordinate largescale infrastructure otherwise. In this way, a sustainable and sustaining infrastructure could be developed—one that is relative and responsive to fluctuations in the size and scope of the community.

 

Work cited

Neylon, Cameron. “Sustaining Scholarly Infrastructures through Collective Action: The Lessons that Olson Can Teach Us.” KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies 1(1): n.p. https://kula.uvic.ca/articles/10.5334/kula.7/