Look to the commons for the future of R&D and science policy

A feature of the research and development landscape brought to the fore by COVID-19, has been the way in which massive public investments in collaborative open scientific research have ultimately led to zero-sum competition between companies, who hold the intellectual property rights to the outputs of this work. Samuel Moore argues, following the work of Elinor Ostrom, that commons-based forms of knowledge production and exchange present a more productive and effective investment for research funds.