Creating a Transnational Green Knowledge Commons for a Socially Just Sustainability Transition

Abstract

Humanity faces numerous deeply interconnected systemic risks to sustainability—a global polycrisis. We need economic institutions that produce the knowledge required to address this polycrisis at the lowest cost, maximize the benefits that knowledge generates, and distribute those benefits fairly. Knowledge improves through use; its value is maximized when it is freely available. Intellectual property rights (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. Building on theories of the commons, the anticommons, and market failures, we propose the creation of a transnational green knowledge commons (TGKC) in which all knowledge that contributes to solving the polycrisis be made open access on the condition that any subsequent improvements also be open access. We argue that a TGKC is more sustainable, just, and efficient than restrictive IPRs and well suited to the motivations and governance institutions of public universities. We show how a single university could initiate the process and estimate that the cost would be more than offset by reduced IPR expenses. A TGKC would reduce the costs of generating and disseminating knowledge directed towards a sustainable future and help stimulate the transnational cooperation, reciprocity, and trust required for sustainable management of the global biophysical commons.

1. Introduction

The United Nations has famously identified 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) to be met by 2030, which also identify where humanity’s current development path is unsustainable (https://sdgs.un.org/goals, accessed 8 December 2024). We cannot treat these challenges as distinct and separate but must instead recognize they emerge from deeply interconnected, systemic, and global risks ranging from biodiversity loss and climate change to pandemic disease and worsening inequality. Collectively, these risks constitute a global “polycrisis”. As defined by the Cascade Institute, “global polycrisis occurs when crises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects. These interacting crises produce harms greater than the sum of those the crises would produce in isolation, were their host systems not so deeply interconnected” [1]. We cannot meet the sustainable development goals without also addressing the polycrisis.

Proposed solutions to many components of the polycrisis frequently stress technological innovations driven by market-based approaches. By the 1950s, there was a growing fear that resource depletion posed a major threat to sustainability [2,3]. Economists, however, argued that as resources grew scarce, their prices would increase, reducing demand and stimulating the innovation of substitutes. The real prices of most resources falling supported this view [4]. Similar mechanisms had disproven Malthus’ [5] predictions of imminent widespread starvation by increasing food production faster than population growth and would later disprove Ehrlich’s similar predictions [6]. In the 1960s and 70s, environmentalists increasingly feared that pollution and resource extraction threatened the continued provision of critical environmental amenities, including life-sustaining ecosystem services, which were not reflected in market prices [7,8,9]. Economists diagnosed the problem as market failure, defined in general as situations in which unregulated markets generate inefficient outcomes and specifically as the lack of private property rights and the presence of externalities, defined as unintended and uncompensated impacts of one economic actor’s production or consumption on another [10,11]. Favored solutions included private property rights [12,13] or internalizing social costs into market prices [14], for example, through pollution taxes. This in turn would theoretically stimulate technological innovations that reduce ecological costs or produce substitutes for environmental amenities [15]. Solow’s Nobel Prize-winning work suggested that technological progress accounts for nearly two-thirds of economic growth in the U.S. [16,17]. Technology is applied knowledge. We clearly live in a knowledge economy [18].

Following Ostrom and Hess [19], we define knowledge as “all intelligible ideas, information, and data in whatever form in which [they are] expressed or obtained…with data being raw bits of information, information being organized data in context, and knowledge being the assimilation of the information and understanding of how to use it” (pp. 7–8) While we do not believe that knowledge alone will solve the polycrisis, meaningful solutions will require an improved understanding of its component parts together with new technologies that can help mitigate and adapt to their consequences. The premise of this article is that if knowledge is to play an important role in overcoming the polycrisis and achieving the SDGs, we require policies and institutions that produce the necessary knowledge at the lowest possible cost and maximize the likelihood of its adoption.

In practice, the past few centuries have witnessed increasing privatization of knowledge through intellectual property rights and integration into the market economy despite serious questions about the theoretical justifications and empirical outcomes. Recognizing that knowledge is collectively created and improves through use, there is a strong argument that it should instead be managed as a global commons [18,20,21,22,23,24,25]. In this article, we summarize these findings and draw on the theory of market failures to explain why IPRs are particularly ill suited to confronting the polycrisis. As an alternative to private IPRs, we propose a transnational green knowledge commons (TGKC) as a no-cost policy (when compared to the status quo) designed to minimize the costs of producing the knowledge required to address the polycrisis and maximize its benefits. The TGKC would make all knowledge that contributes to a socially just sustainability transition available to all. While the idea of a knowledge commons is far from original, our contribution to this discussion is to outline a viable, simple-to-initiate, low-cost institution for creating and governing a global knowledge commons.

The article is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the collective and cumulative nature of human knowledge, the market failures affecting its production and consumption, and the just distribution of rewards for the production and use of knowledge, all in the context of IPRs. Section 3 provides a brief history of intellectual property rights and the theories underlying their adoption and explains why traditional intellectual property rights are unlikely to produce the right knowledge at the lowest cost or maximize its value. Section 4 explains why a TGKC would be far more effective and efficient than privately held intellectual property rights, how one could be initiated at a negative cost, and how it would be governed. Section 5 explores how a TGKC could pave the way for creating additional global commons necessary to address the polycrisis. Section 6 presents our summary and conclusions.

2. The Nature of Knowledge

Perhaps the most common definition of economics is “the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends” [26] (p. 1) or some variant thereof. In economics, a resource is considered scarce if use by one person leaves less for others, and there is not enough available for all desired uses, leading to competition for use. Though knowledge is essential for all economic activity, it is not scarce but rather non-rival, meaning that use by one person does not leave less for others, or even anti-rival in that it improves through use [24,27].

Access to existing knowledge is crucial to produce any new ideas. New technologies typically emerge from combining key elements of older technologies [28]. The steamboat would not have been possible without the invention of both the boat and the steam-powered engine, which themselves built on innumerable past inventions [29]. Isaac Newton acknowledged that he saw further by standing on the shoulders of giants [30]. Human knowledge is inherently collective and cumulative, created by billions of people over thousands of years [31].

Even in pre-literate cultures, individuals rely on more knowledge than can be acquired by a single person in a single lifetime to satisfy even the most basic human needs [31,32]. In modern society, growing food requires knowledge of soils, seeds, and plants; of where mineral resources are located, how to mine them, and how to smelt metal; how to fashion that metal into farm implements; how to store food once it has been harvested; and so on. Building a Boeing 747 requires vastly more knowledge that can be generated only collectively by vastly more individuals. Thinking itself is an inherently social endeavor, at which groups perform far better than individuals. The more knowledge we acquire as a collective (greatly facilitated by writing, computers, and other tools for storing information), the more intelligent we become as a species but the less any individual knows about any given field of science or technology [33,34].

These dependencies mean that a single individual is almost never responsible for any major scientific breakthrough. Rather, societies gradually achieve a certain level of scientific knowledge that makes certain breakthroughs more likely. History is replete with examples of major scientific breakthroughs occurring at the same time in vastly different regions and conditions. Examples include Darwin’s and Wallace’s discovery of evolution through natural selection, Newton’s and Leibniz’s invention of calculus, the development of telephonic technology [29], advances in quantum electrodynamics [35], and applications of CRISPR/CAS 9 gene splicing [36]. A 1922 publication lists 148 inventions and discoveries that occurred simultaneously [37]. Many of history’s “great ideas” resulted not from uniquely brilliant humans but rather from a natural progression of advances in cumulative human knowledge and, of course, from humans having access to that knowledge.

2.1. The Just Distribution of the Fruits of Knowledge

The average person alive today enjoys a longer, more affluent life than someone of equal health, strength, and intelligence living 100 years ago thanks to the collective innovations of the last century. We do not deserve longer lives than our predecessors; we simply enjoy access to more collective knowledge (and to resources to which knowledge provides access) that enables longer lives [29].

Similarly, corporations today are more productive than those in the past because they, too, have access to more collective knowledge. But the profits from knowledge generally flow not to those who create the knowledge but to those who claim IPRs and commercialize it. Mazzucato [38] documents how the public sector developed or funded the development of most technologies on which the world’s richest corporations rely for profits. Many of the highest-valued companies today, such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook, would be worth little to nothing without the Internet, largely developed by the U.S. government and largely run on open-source software. The public sector developed most of the technologies underlying the cellphone, funded the research leading to the Google search engine, and today funds the research underlying most new pharmaceuticals, including COVID vaccines [39]. Assigning property rights for collectively generated knowledge to specific individuals or corporations is inherently unfair. And, as we will see, it is even more unfair when private corporations charge monopoly prices to the public for publicly funded knowledge.

2.2. The Economics of Knowledge

Markets are only possible for excludable resources accessible only to paying customers and are only efficient for rival resources (use by one person leaves less for others) whose production and consumption generate no externalities, defined as unintended and uncompensated impacts on others [40]. We have already explained that knowledge is non-rival; in the age of the Internet and reverse engineering, it is increasingly difficult to make it excludable [20]. The production or use of knowledge that reduces ecological costs or increases social benefits generates positive externalities. Private monopolies are also inefficient. Intellectual property rights create temporary monopolies, and as we explain below, knowledge has the characteristics of a natural monopoly. Non-rivalry, non-excludability, externalities, and monopolies are all considered market failures [40,41], raising serious questions about the efficiency of IPRs. Some of the literature on market failures seeks market solutions, but we believe appropriate allocative institutions should be determined by the desired goals and the physical characteristics of the resources in question.

We have already discussed the concept of non-rivalry. Since one person’s use of knowledge does not leave any less knowledge for others, the only costs to society of sharing knowledge are the resources required to disseminate it. In the age of the Internet, these costs are negligible. According to mainstream economic theory, if the social benefits from additional use of any commodity exceed the social costs, more use increases social welfare. The social benefits of knowledge are therefore maximized when access to that knowledge is free [24]. The price-rationing of information or any other non-rival resource creates artificial scarcity, inefficiently reducing social welfare [42].

Knowledge is also an example of what economists call a natural monopoly. In a natural monopoly, fixed costs (those that must be paid no matter what) are very high, and marginal costs (the costs of adding another user to the system or of producing an additional unit) are low and constant. Water systems provide a classic example. It is expensive to build a reservoir or water main; yet, it is quite cheap to connect one more household to existing infrastructure. As municipalities divide the high, fixed costs among more and more households, average total costs decline. But those average total costs will never fall as low as marginal costs. One firm can produce any given output for a lower total cost than can many firms; therefore, market competition proves inefficient. Marginal cost pricing, which mainstream economists deem socially optimal, will never recoup the full costs of production. A profit-maximizing monopolist would set prices much higher than marginal costs, thus creating a large, deadweight loss of economic surplus. As a result, most natural monopolies are run as public utilities or as tightly regulated private companies, which are allowed to recoup their costs but not to maximize profits. Figure 1 illustrates this dynamic.

Developing new knowledge can be extremely expensive, but the cost of sharing that knowledge, (e.g., on the Internet), is negligible: Knowledge is a perfect example of a natural monopoly. Pharmaceuticals offer an excellent illustration. Between 2009–2018, the R&D and clinical trials required to develop a new drug averaged an estimated USD 1.5 billion (median USD 1.1 billion) [43], but the marginal cost of producing additional doses is often negligible. Between 2010 and 2016, 100% of 210 newly approved drugs in the U.S. were at funded at least partially by the public sector, including USD 100 billion from the NIH (National Institute of Health) alone [44]. In a more recent example, it cost billions of dollars to fund (primarily through the public sector) the development of COVID vaccines but only an estimated USD 1.20 to produce a single dose. Most pharmaceutical corporations charge many times the cost of production, earning billions in profits—an estimated USD 90 billion for COVID alone [45], producing at least nine new COVID billionaires [46]. Nonetheless, some COVID vaccine manufacturers more than quadrupled their prices in 2023 [47].

The natural-monopoly nature of knowledge may be less relevant when technologies developed from that knowledge have high and rising marginal costs. Marginal costs for a fossil-fueled power plant, for example, include the costs of fossil fuels. Alternative energy, in contrast, has high fixed costs (e.g., building solar panels or windmills) with very low marginal costs [48] since the energy source is free and largely non-rival across different geographic areas: One country’s capture of solar energy has no impact on the quantity available for other countries. Although it is true that the scarcity of the rare-earth metals required for most green technologies means the price of rare earths are likely to increase dramatically with growing demand, increasing knowledge has dramatically decreased the marginal costs of alternative energy over time and may lead to discoveries of more abundant substitutes for rare earths [49]. Nonetheless, governments typically fail to treat knowledge as a non-rival natural monopoly, as we explain in the following section.

3. A Brief History of IPRs and Analysis of Their Shortcomings

For much of human history, most knowledge was common property, part of the shared inheritance within cultures and freely adopted by other cultures when the opportunity and desire arose. The only way to “own” knowledge was to hide it from others. Adam Smith famously decried “trade secrets” as the antithesis of free markets, because they conferred monopoly power on whomever possessed them [50].

Despite the numerous market failures affecting knowledge, many economists support patents—a type of temporary monopoly—for two reasons. First, patents ensure that trade secrets will not be lost if their owners die. Second, individuals and firms may (see below) underinvest in research and development (R&D) if they know other firms can adopt their inventions at no cost. IPRs’ guarantee of temporary monopoly ownership in exchange for subsequent permanent open access can therefore encourage more private-sector R&D to the supposed benefit of industry and the economy.

The first formal patent for an industrial process was awarded in Florence, Italy, in 1421, and the first formal law was England’s 1623 Statute of Monopolies. Registering the technology with the state granted exclusive use of that technology to the inventor for a relatively short period [51] when technology was advancing at a relatively slow pace [52], so the useful life of an invention greatly exceeded the span of the patent. Modern copyright law protecting the rights of authors dates back to 1710 in England [53].

The U.S. constitution (Article I, Clause 8) permits patents and copyrights “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries”. The first patent and copyright grants were valid for 14 years. Congress later extended the term for patents to 17 years. Other countries rapidly adopted similar systems. The Uruguay round of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (1986–1994) negotiated “Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights”, which made patents in all member countries of the World Trade Organization valid for a minimum of 20 years [51], even as the expected useful lifespan of any given technology was plunging. Congress extended copyright in the U.S. to the life of the author plus 70 years or to 120 years for works made for hire. The Berne Convention of 1988 enforced these rights globally [53]. A case challenging Congress’s extension failed in the Supreme Court in 2003 (Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186) [54].

Before 1980, the U.S. government held patents to publicly funded research in the U.S. To promote the commercialization of such research, the Bayh–Dole Act of 1980 allowed the private sector and universities to patent research conducted with government funds, leading to a dramatic increase in the share of new patents held by universities. The policy has been widely copied around the world [55].

Despite awards of 300,000–400,000 U.S. patents each year, there is no consensus on whether patents stimulate innovation and economic growth. Some studies find no impact [56]. Others suggest that strong intellectual property rights discourage subsequent innovation [57,58] due in part to high litigation costs [59]. Other studies find positive impacts, though primarily in wealthier countries [60], where the global ecological costs of additional growth are likely to exceed the economic benefits and where growth itself may be uneconomic [61]. Figure 2 depicts countries in proportion to their royalty flows, showing clearly that, overall, IPRs reallocate wealth from the poorest countries to the richest.

3.1. Why IPRs Are Unlikely to Help Solve the Polycrisis

In the modern context, we must ask not only whether patents and copyright promote the progress of science in general but also whether they promote solutions to the polycrisis. We focus here on the problems of sustainability—environmental degradation, pandemics, and inequality/poverty—but our arguments also apply to other elements of the polycrisis.

Mainstream economists consider most forms of environmental degradation to be negative externalities of market activities, a form of market failure. We define externalities as unintended impacts of one economic actor’s activities on others, with no adequate compensation for those impacts. Since economic actors need not compensate society for the costs they impose, they often ignore these costs in their economic decisions [62]. And if they ignore these costs, they will also ignore the benefits of reducing them. A profit-seeking firm has no economic incentive to dedicate its R&D to reducing the costs it is allowed to socialize [63].

IPRs might incentivize green technologies if firms were forced to pay for the ecological costs the firms’ activities impose on the rest of us—that is, if firms were forced to internalize externalities by paying taxes, for example, on the activities causing the externalities. Most firms will invest in green R&D only if they expect the discounted value of future benefits to exceed the costs. Unfortunately, the costs of developing innovative green technologies can be too expensive and risky for a single firm. Such costs are likely to precede benefits by years or even decades. And even if the research yields tangible results, patent protection for those results can be difficult and costly to enforce, especially internationally. Firms are likely to underinvest in R&D if their inventions can be copied by others. As a result, few firms or venture capitalists are willing to invest in the R&D necessary to advance green technology [38,64,65]. Those countries making the greatest advances in green technologies rely heavily on public-sector investments for both R&D and commercial development [38].

Unregulated markets also provide little incentive for firms to address inequality and poverty. Markets weight preferences by purchasing power, which the poor lack. The so-called invisible hand of the market reallocates resources from overserved sectors of the economy—where demand is low relative to supply, and prices are inadequate to generate profits—to underserved sectors—where demand is high relative to supply, thus generating excessive profits [66]. It is more profitable to produce luxuries for the rich than necessities for the poor. Markets are therefore unlikely to allocate R&D funds towards the needs of the poor.

A case study illustrates our point. In the 1970s, scientists developed a new drug, eflornithine, later discovered to reduce the growth of unwanted facial hair in women and to kill trypanosomes, parasites that cause African sleeping sickness. Production for unwanted facial hair promised far more lucrative returns than treating sleeping sickness for impoverished Africans, so Aventis discontinued production for the latter until Doctors without Borders convinced Aventis to license the drug to them [67]. Broader studies of the pharmaceutical industry found that drug companies invest little in treatments for infectious diseases that afflict primarily the poor and propose public-sector investments in R&D as a possible solution to a problem private markets cannot solve [68,69]. Such investment is crucial in an era when tropical diseases are reaching pandemic levels in certain regions [70] and when climate change threatens to exacerbate and globalize those regional epidemics [71]. Markets allocate resources toward those with money and unmet wants, not towards the basic needs of the poor.

Economic efficiency requires that we invest in R&D if the total benefits of doing so exceed the total costs. Similar to Figure 1, Figure 3 below shows a hypothetical unit of knowledge—for example, a cure for a life-threatening disease that afflicts only the poor—for which the market price is never high enough to cover the total costs of production, even though the benefits to society greatly outweigh the costs. The private sector will not invest in such technologies.

To make matters worse, an AAAS survey found that 35% of academics in the biosciences reported difficulties acquiring patented information necessary for their research; of those scientists, 50% had to change the focus of their research, and 28% had to abandon it all together [72]. Another survey of agricultural biologists found that “scientists consider the proliferation of intellectual property protection to have a strongly negative effect on research” [73] (p. 36). IPRs clearly influence what research is conducted, favoring only R&D that can generate the revenues necessary to pay the royalties on existing knowledge used in the research.

3.2. Why IPRs Increase the Costs of Developing New Knowledge

Another major problem with IPRs is that they increase the cost of conducting research. New knowledge arises from existing knowledge. But IPRs make knowledge excludable, allowing rights holders to price ration access to that knowledge despite the non-rival nature of knowledge. The proliferation of patents means that most new research infringes on existing patents, the owners of which are likely to demand royalties. For example, the average new medical technology infringes on 50 existing patents, any one of which could prevent the new technology from being produced or commercialized [58]. Heller labels this phenomenon the tragedy of the anticommons, defined as a regime in which a single resource has many owners, each of whom can deny access to others. The current intellectual property regime parcels up knowledge into a series of distinct claims, treating those claims as separately owned monopolies, encouraging self-serving behavior and undermining socially desirable outcomes [74].

Heller tells the story of a new drug to treat Alzheimer’s. Due to the company’s inability to pay for access to infringed patents, the drug never treated an Alzheimer’s patient [74]. Scientists eager to develop better crops to meet the needs of the poor similarly find that IPRs present serious obstacles. The inventors of Golden Rice^©, genetically modified to produce vitamin A, sought to make their inventions freely available to low-income farmers. However, an audit of the technology employed to develop the rice discovered infringement of some 70 patents held by 32 corporations. The difficulties of identifying these infringements, coupled with the need to negotiate licensing arrangements (a task that required considerable help from foundations and government), added significant costs and delays in making the technology available to farmers [75,76].

Patents are expensive to acquire and defend. It generally costs USD 10,000–USD 40,000 to obtain a defensible patent (including lawyer fees, filing costs, etc.) [77]. In the U.S. alone, 646,244 patent applications generated 388,900 patent grants in 2020 [78]. Over 13,000 IPR cases were filed in U.S. courts in 2018, of which 3694 concerned patents [79]. The average cost of patent litigation ranges from USD 500,000 when less than USD 1 million is at risk to USD 5.5 million when over USD 25 million is at risk [80]. Just recently, Siemens Gamesa successfully sued GE, resulting in a ban on GE wind turbine blades, potentially raising the cost and slowing the development of wind power [81].

Most litigation is initiated by non-practicing entities (NPEs), also known as patent trolls, who purchase dormant patents solely to sue corporations who might infringe upon them [82]. NPEs now account for well over half of all patent litigation, although the vast majority of cases are settled out of court [79]. The estimated direct costs of patent trolling borne by litigated firms reached USD 29 billion in 2010 [83]. A more comprehensive valuation based on stock market prices estimated nearly half a trillion in social costs from patent litigation between 1990 and 2010 [84], a figure that ignores the significant reduction in R&D expenditures by firms subsequent to litigation [85] and the publicly borne cost to the judicial system. Patent trolling poses a serious threat to green technologies [86]. Universities sometimes sell their patents to NPEs [87], and some researchers view universities themselves as patent trolls [88]. Nonetheless, only 11% of universities profit from IPRs; the remaining universities spend taxpayer money and tuition to reduce access to knowledge generated primarily with public funds [89].

A similar story plays out with copyrights for scientific literature. Universities, both public and private, produce vast quantities of new knowledge, and university professors eagerly publish their findings since numerous publications and citations contribute directly to career advancement. Access to existing knowledge is so fundamental to creating new knowledge that almost every academic thesis, dissertation, or journal article begins with a review of the existing literature. However, the main venue for academic publications remains for-profit journals, which charge publication fees to authors, access fees to readers, or both. Most academic literature resides behind paywalls. Although universities pay their faculty to write and review articles, and although public funding covers most research expenditures, for-profit publishers nevertheless charge universities for access to the knowledge they generated in the first place. The system resembles something out of Alice in Wonderland: Nonprofit universities (with support from taxpayers, foundations, and student tuition dollars) fund research; they then give the results of that research to commercial publishers without compensation (sometimes actually paying the publishers to take it); and the universities and researchers then buy it back by purchasing books, journal subscriptions, and database licenses.

It can be prohibitively expensive for independent researchers or innovators to access this knowledge. Medical doctors in private practice often lack access to the latest research on life-saving medical treatments. Universities typically subscribe to numerous journals, which are then “free” for faculty, students, and other university affiliates. However, despite the rapid proliferation of on-line journals with lower publishing costs than print editions, subscription prices have increased far faster than inflation in recent decades, as have the profits of academic publishers [90]. At least four academic publishers regularly earn over 40% in annual profits, far higher than most corporations [91]. The rate at which university libraries are cancelling subscriptions in the face of such increases evidences the unsustainability and suggests the unreformability of this model. Even the richest universities struggle to afford subscriptions [92,93], and the money these universities spend to access literature could otherwise be spent on research and education. There is a growing movement to require researchers to publish publicly funded research in open-access venues [94,95], but most journals charge article-publishing fees, typically paid with money that would otherwise be used to conduct research [96]. Furthermore, paying to publish, especially in for-profit journals, raises serious concerns about publication quality. Numerous studies have found that a majority of for-profit open-access journals were willing to publish bogus research articles (e.g., [97]). Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, famously tracked such “predatory publishers” on the eponymous Beall’s List until lawsuits by some publishers and resulting pressure from his university forced him to stop [98]. Low-quality publications threaten to pollute the stream of knowledge with so much garbage it becomes unsafe to drink.

The system simply does not provide access to good research to many who need it. Consider that academic publishers publish, on average, fewer than 200 copies of a given academic book [99]. Now consider a world population of just over 8 billion people. And consider that 86,338 libraries attempt to serve that population (https://librarymap.ifla.org/, accessed on 22 August 2024). This means only one copy of that book for every 431 academic libraries. Or one copy for every 41 million people. Most libraries in the world—not to mention most citizens of the world—lack access to academic literature.

3.3. Why IPRs Reduce the Benefits from Existing Knowledge

Price rationing access to knowledge not only raises the costs of innovation, but it also reduces the benefits. Patent holders can charge monopoly prices for their output, creating large deadweight losses of economic surplus, as seen in Figure 1. Mainstream market theory acknowledges that economic surplus is maximized when price equals marginal cost, which, in the case of existing technology, is zero [40]. Deadweight losses grow even larger when the output in question generates positive externalities or reduces the negative externalities from alternatives. An obvious example of positive externalities is herd immunity to COVID or any other contagious disease, achieved when a critical mass of people are vaccinated. But high vaccine prices hinder this goal: The higher the price, the fewer people likely to be immunized, and the lower the chance of achieving herd immunity. The fewer people immunized, the more opportunities for virus spread and for the evolution of variants [39,63]. Green technologies are, by definition, less environmentally harmful substitutes for polluting technologies. If scientists develop an inexpensive new way to capture solar energy and then charge the highest price the market will bear, those who cannot afford the new solar technology may continue to burn coal and other fossil fuels, with obvious consequences.

This problem with IPRs is widely recognized, and much of the legislation protecting IPRs includes pathways for making the IPRs less restrictive. The World Trade Organization’s Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) allows compulsory licensing and parallel importation under certain situations. Compulsory licensing allows countries to produce patented drugs domestically without the patent holder’s permission, which is only possible in countries that have the capacity to manufacture drugs. Parallel importation allows countries to import drugs from other countries where it is available at a lower cost. March-in rights allow governments to break patents when it is deemed in the public interest. The previously mentioned Bayh–Dole Act allows march-in rights in situations when patented products are not made commercially available on incompletely defined “reasonable terms”, though they have yet to be successfully applied [100]. Specific case studies help illustrate the problems with these policies.

In the late 1990s, AIDS was spreading rapidly worldwide, especially in South Africa, where infection rates had climbed to well over 500,000 people per year and death tolls to about 150,000, over 50% of adult mortality [101]. In 1997, South Africa enacted a law to allow compulsory licensing for AIDS treatments, whereupon it was sued by over 40 multinational corporations for violating TRIPS. The U.S. threatened trade sanctions and denied preferential tariff treatments for South African imports. Vice President and Presidential candidate Al Gore, who received substantial donations from pharmaceutical corporations, was a key player in this effort [102]. The U.S. similarly opened a case against Brazil in 2000 to challenge Brazil’s compulsory licensing law. Brazil aggressively challenged the U.S., framing the dispute as a North–South conflict, and received enough international support to get the U.S. to drop its suit. Brazil subsequently used the threat of compulsory licensing to get corporations to provide AIDS treatments at a lower cost. In response to these threats, however, the U.S. again threatened trade sanctions and even the termination of Brazilian scientific projects at U.S. universities [100]. While in both cases, law suits were dropped, it was no doubt obvious to other countries that pursuing compulsory licensing risked retaliation from powerful countries [103].

March-in rights have fared no better. In June 2003, Congress passed the Medicare Part D legislation, which explicitly prohibited the federal government from negotiating drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. Shortly afterwards, Abbot Industries quintupled the price of ritonavir, an important AIDS drug developed with federal funding. AIDS activists pressured the government to impose march-in rights but were rejected on the grounds that the drug was still commercially available. Subsequent efforts to apply march-in rights met with similar outcomes, and they have never been used in the U.S. [100]. As one study concludes, “compulsory licensing does not appear as a healthy long-term policy” [103] (p. 138). A similar study discussing both compulsory licensing and march-in rights concludes that “over the last four decades, the relationship between governments and corporations … have given more power to corporations” but suggests that activists and public health advocates could help pressure the government to act in the public interest [100] (p. 11). However, other research has found that “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence” [104] (p. 564). It is time to look to alternatives.

4. How a Knowledge Commons Overcomes the Failures of IPRs

Though many of the problems with IPRs described above are widely recognized, the dominant counterargument in their favor is that without IPRs, the private sector will underinvest in R&D. This is the theoretical justification for strengthening IPRs. However, because IPRs are difficult and expensive to obtain and protect, this is likely true even with IPRs [20]. The logical solution is a transnational green knowledge commons (TGKC), in which scientific knowledge, especially knowledge contributing to a socially just sustainability transition (i.e., “green” knowledge), is freely available to all on the condition that any improvements to the technology become freely available, known as copy-lefting and attainable through existing licenses such as the GNU General Public License (GPL) (primarily for software) or the Creative Commons Share-Alike License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/, accessed on 22 August 2024). Scientists must, of course, be paid for the knowledge they produce, and when the benefits from that knowledge are public, the funding should be as well. We make the case here that a TGKC is more likely than the current system to produce the knowledge required to address the polycrisis, to minimize the cost of producing knowledge, and to maximize the value of that knowledge once produced.

Universities, which receive most of their research funds from the public sector and are explicitly dedicated to the production and dissemination of knowledge, are the logical starting point for a TGKC. While universities account for a relatively small share of all R&D (only about 12% in the U.S.), they dominate in the basic research (about 50% in the U.S.) [105] required for novel breakthroughs that address our biggest challenges. Most research on climate change, biodiversity loss, and other environmental problems is conducted at universities. University scientists also conducted the basic research necessary to develop mRNA vaccines for COVID [106], built the first usable computation model of the COVID-19 virus [107], and generally played a critical role in confronting the pandemic [108]. In general, university scientists have more flexibility than private-sector scientists to prioritize the common good over profits in their choice of research topics. Returning to the example of eflornithine, it is hard to imagine that most scientists, especially public-sector scientists, would not prefer to develop life-saving drugs over cosmetics, and it is only logical they would prioritize understanding and solving the polycrisis. In a flourishing TGKC, we expect research agendas would increasingly be driven by the common good and not private profit, although nothing would prevent the private sector from conducting and patenting its own research with its own funding.

We have already shown that the return on IPRs is negative for most universities, suggesting that eliminating IPRs would save money. Universities receive most of their research funding from the public sector—over 60% in the U.S.—with an additional 25% provided by the universities themselves and less than 6% by the private sector [109]. When the public pays for knowledge creation, the public deserves access to that knowledge. Universities already pay the labor costs of writing and reviewing journal articles for for-profit corporations. Most academic journal editors are university professors. They receive relatively small stipends, if any, for their efforts from the corporations; they are effectively subsidized by their universities [110]. Universities also enable monopolistic profit margins by academic publishers [90], which obtain an estimated 68–75% of their revenue from universities—enough to cover all pre-profit production costs [111]. Universities already have or could easily recruit the managerial staff required to edit and publish journal articles, whose salaries they are in effect already paying through subscription fees. We are beginning to see such work at new, diamond open-access presses at, for example, Aberdeen University, the University of Vermont, and University College London. The rise of open-access presses within university libraries signals a growing awareness by both libraries and their parent institutions that the academy can no longer afford the fees demanded by commercial publishers and that they should be responsible for the work they have traditionally ceded to the commercial sector. Such work constitutes an implicit acknowledgement that the current, for-profit system of academic publishing cannot be reformed; it must, over time, be supplanted by diamond open-access publications, for which non-profit publishers charge no fees to authors or readers.

Since existing knowledge is the dominant input into new knowledge, ensuring open access to existing knowledge would lower research costs. Since scientists would not compete for patents, they would be more willing to share their work while in progress, eliminating the need for costly replication of research efforts.

While ideally, a TGKC should be initiated by a global coalition of universities, a single university could initiate a TGKC by simply declaring that it will copy-left all its research and invite other universities to join in and do the same. Ideally, all universities currently earning zero or negative returns on IPRs would join the consortium, together with public-sector research organizations and the numerous existing knowledge commons.

The fullest benefits of a TGKC come with scale, when there are enough participating universities to share the costs of open-access publication. Even with small TGKC, however, participating members could initially mandate that all their publications be made available via pre-publication repositories (known as green open access) or reward professors for doing so, as the University of Liege did in 2008 with tremendous success [112,113]. Even single universities can create their own diamond open-access publications, as the University of Vermont is currently doing. The Public Knowledge Project [114] and the Knowledge Futures Group (https://www.pubpub.org, accessed on 22 August 2024) have already developed the necessary open-source software. As more universities join the TGKC, they could share the costs of diamond open-access publishing. Public funders and foundations should be encouraged to preferentially fund members of the TGKC, maximizing the value of their grants. The Higher Education Leadership Initiative (HELIOS) and cOAlition S have important roles to play in this sphere. As the TGKC expands, funders could agree to fund only TGKC members. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy took an enormous step in 2022 when it mandated that all taxpayer research be made freely available to the American public at no cost by the end of 2025 [115]. If the U.S. government can mandate open access for all federally funded research, certainly other agencies can mandate the same for all research on sustainability. When prices no longer ration access, the knowledge generated by universities will be more valuable. People will be free to use knowledge until the marginal benefits of doing so approach zero—the criterion in mainstream economics for efficient allocation. Firms will no longer earn monopoly profits from their patents but will instead compete to produce green technologies, medicines, and so on at the lowest possible cost—the theoretical outcome of competitive free markets [66]. Adam Smith would be happy.

Compared to the current system, a TGKC reduces the costs and increases the benefits of knowledge creation. Universities have already established rigorous procedures for conducting and reviewing research, so no new governance mechanisms would be required. It is worth assessing how well these existing mechanisms map on to Ostrom’s famous eight design principles for managing common property resources, listed in bold font below [116]. While many of these are more relevant to rival resources than to a knowledge commons, several relevant principles are already being applied in universities. Ostrom’s first principle is that commons must have clearly defined boundaries. There are no meaningful boundaries to a TGCK since its knowledge is open-access at the global scale. This openness obviates the principle that rules should fit local circumstances. Universities already have in place a rigorous culture of participatory decision making through a grant-writing and publication process governed by peer review and pressure to remain within the paradigmatic boundaries of a given field. Fortunately, universities also nurture the iconoclasts who disrupt or overturn existing paradigms, tacitly supporting a mindset critical to advancing knowledge. Knowledge creation is unavoidably participatory, as discussed in Section 2. Universities also promote the monitoring of the knowledge commons. Scientists rigorously monitor scientific knowledge, with an explicit goal of trying to prove it false. Despite occasional failures, this system has proven highly effective. Concerning graduated sanctions for abusers, universities have well-established sanctions for scientists who do poor-quality research, and the only way to freeride on a TGKC is not to contribute any resources to research. To deter freeriders, and in distinct opposition to the Bayh–Dole Act, funding agencies could deny funding for privatized knowledge. Ostrom also calls for accessible conflict resolution. Existing academic rules for resolving conflicts between competing scientific ideas are well established, though not perfect in that they favor existing paradigms over new ones, but they nonetheless allow for paradigm shifts [117]. The only other potential conflict in a TGKC would be if someone tried to patent improvements to copy-lefted knowledge, a situation readily resolved through the existing court system. The right to organize already exists for a TGKC; we call only for taking advantage of existing rights. Finally, thanks to existing collaborations, academic societies, and global initiatives (e.g., IPCC and IPBES), most university researchers are already nested within networks [118]. The TGKC would further expand this network, which is necessary to promote cooperation at the scale required by different elements of the polycrisis.

Social justice and sustainability principles require that universities from those countries that have contributed the most to the polycrisis (perhaps using climate change as a proxy) be the first ones to contribute to a TGKC. The countries responsible for the majority of global R&D—the U.S., China, the European Union, Japan, India, South Korea, and Russia—are also responsible for the majority of global greenhouse gas emissions [105,119]. The richest of these countries have already promised resources to the poorer nations likely to suffer the most from climate change, yet they have failed to meet their obligations [120]. Providing free knowledge for green technologies would help poorer countries with mitigation and adaptation, require no new resource commitments, and directly benefit the countries providing the knowledge. Such a commitment would represent a small but important step in atoning for the climate harm wealthy countries have already caused. The more that other countries adopt these technologies, the more the countries that provide them benefit. Under such conditions, freeriding is impossible.

A TGKC could also use something like patent trolling to bring more knowledge into the public sphere. This would entail the TGKC acquiring unused patents, through donation or purchase, in order to challenge later patents that infringed on these, forcing them to become open.

5. The GKC as a Path to Managing the Global Commons

Most components of the polycrisis have the attributes of social dilemmas and can only be solved through cooperation at the necessary scale. Humans evolved to be cooperative but also to be cautious about not cooperating with people unlikely to reciprocate [121]. Conversely, reciprocation has become an automatic response to kindness and generosity, even between nations [122]. Tit-for-tat is a proven winning strategy in social dilemmas [123]. When contemplating the environmental crisis, we see that rich countries impose major environmental costs on the planet for their own gain; they can hardly expect other countries to cooperate at the outset on solutions. The first movers in a TGKC must help introduce a cycle of cooperation. As other countries benefit from freely available technologies, they will prove more likely reciprocate, both by contributing knowledge to the TGKC and by becoming more open to cooperation in other areas.

Science diplomacy has eased tensions between countries, including the USSR, China, North Korea, and the U.S. [124]. The AAAS Center for Science Diplomacy conceptualizes “science diplomacy as a critical aspect of 21st century science and international relations… [to] build bridges between societies where official relationships may be strained” (https://www.aaas.org/programs/center-science-diplomacy/about, accessed on 22 August 2024).

By easing tensions and promoting reciprocity, a TGKC could facilitate the development of institutions for managing additional elements of the global commons, such as the atmosphere [125], the oceans [126,127], Antarctica, and so on [128]. It is worth noting that there are no externalities when the decision-making unit is at the scale of unintended consequences [129].

6. Summary and Conclusions

The UN SDGs recognize that we must “mobilize both existing and additional resources” to achieve success, which requires “a strong commitment to global partnership and cooperation” (SDG 17). One of the most important resources required to achieve the SDGs is knowledge. The SDGs also call for “effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels” (SDG 16) (https://sdgs.un.org/goals, accessed 8 December 2024). We propose the TGKC as an institution dedicated to mobilizing knowledge for the achievement of all the SDGs.

There is little empirical or theoretical evidence that the institution of IPRs stimulates innovation in general, and there is compelling evidence that IPRs are even less likely to contribute to the production and widespread dissemination of knowledge required to confront the polycrisis. New laws forcing the private sector to account for the ecological and social costs of their activities might help direct R&D towards solutions to the polycrisis, but such legislative changes are difficult to achieve, especially in the current era of extreme political polarization and money in politics [104]. Furthermore, the internalization of social costs would do nothing to address the high costs of IPRs and the high risk to a single firm investing in green technology R&D. In distinct contrast, a single visionary university or a consortium of such universities could launch a TGKC at no cost or even negative cost, with no changes to current laws and little need for new governance mechanisms. Such a consortium could quickly attract new members. If governments and philanthropies hoping to maximize research impacts explicitly favor consortium members, it could grow rapidly.

While we believe our arguments support an end to IPRs in general, we are proposing the more conservative and entirely voluntary approach of initiating a TGKC alongside the current system of IPRs. We do not believe it is possible to theorize new institutions at our desks then expect them to perform precisely as described. However, implementing a TGKC will generate new knowledge about its strengths and weaknesses, allowing for its continual improvement through a process of adaptive management. If the TGKC proves effective at producing the knowledge we need to address the sustainability crisis at a low cost and increasing its adoption by making it free, we can then consider expanding the TGKC to all knowledge, thus freeing up the associated expenses of creating and defending IPRs. A TGKC is not a panacea, but if successful, it could help stimulate the global cooperation necessary to confront the polycrisis and achieve a socially just sustainability transition.