An open invitation by Thomas Olsen and Nicolas Mendoza, “To the world’s up-and-coming ‘r2r community’.”

See here for more info.

The P2P Foundation intends to introduce a new and hopefully sustainable avenue for research and knowledge enhancement, differing from what universities and think tanks represent.

Universities are, although often populated by people full of good intentions, products of the Westphalian competition-based, nation-state system, where national, commercial and vested interests rule. They tend to compartmentalize and privatize knowledge, and are driven by both intra- and inter-institutional competition, both for resources and ownership. Cross-disciplinary research is therefore still rare and traditional institutional ‘cultures’ tend to rule both engagement and outcome.

As researchers we have therefore, for too long, been driven by institutional formats. E.g. shall a Master thesis in the UK preferably not exceed 50 pages, and even a PhD thesis shall only include ‘small contributions’ to the overall body of knowledge in its field – the rest focusing on a discussion on already existing knowledge. Not already established lines of thinking are frowned upon, which in itself is a serious problem for a world in transition. Furthermore is research conducted outside established research centers often ignored, and funding for independent initiatives still very hard to get by.

Think Tanks may have a different agenda, but their funding remains the key to their existence. Much such funding is of a very discreet nature – often for good reasons.

That the world is full of people who have both valuable and priceless insights in the environments and situations they are a part of – without having chosen an academic career – is, in a system like this, difficult to appreciate and/or benefit from. Research should therefore, if it is to serve people in general, also be contributed to by people on the fringes of – and even outside – the established research community. Our initiative’s main objective is in fact to help remove the glass ceiling that currently separates the societies we research from the research we do on societies.

Quality in research brews not only from acquired research skills, but also from interest, sincerity, integrity, urgency and relative importance. In our r2r (= researcher-to-researcher) research model can all these contributions freely meet and interact, to the benefit of society and humanity.

We believe that new ways of conceiving, conducting, writing and publishing formal research are essential. Therefore, we propose a p2p research model (which we shall call r2r), consistent with the very idea of p2p, as represented by the P2P Foundation. In brief we believe that open p2p collaborative practices outperform centralized methodologies, and we claim this will also apply to future research, as follows:

1) r2r is a ‘commons-driven’ research model.
2) r2r research shall be possible to use for any type of research that registered community members wish to conduct.

3) r2r research projects will benefit from being able to receive the collaboration of the most relevant and interested experts, regardless of affiliation.
4) r2r research projects will be able to afford significantly broader scope and to be conducted through innovative research dynamics.

At the P2P Foundation we have drafted a ‘model’ for how to initiate, conduct, execute and publish r2r research projects along the above indicated lines. We believe that this model could be of interest also to others who, just like ourselves, actively try to break away from today’s institutional monopoly-approach.