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98 for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), which devises a multilateral system of facilitated exchange for germplasm. Within this framework, the contracting parties mutually recognize sovereignty rights over their respective genetic resources, as established by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), but use those sovereignty rights to pool the crop genetic resources held in their national collections for agricultural innovation and crop development. A similar movement is also occurring in the microbial research community, where an integrated research commons has been proposed in order to guarantee access to microbial materials, data and knowledge, in the form of scientific publications. Finally, another initiative that is worth mentioning in biotechnology is that undertaken by CAMBIA, a non profit research institute that has since pioneered the use of open-source-like licensing of research tools and enabling technologies.

All these experiences, although different in their nature and scope, unveil a common narrative account that is useful to summarize for understanding the emergence and rationale behind contractually-constructed research commons. Almost all the proposals and initiatives start recognising the great economic and technological changes that have significantly transformed the scientific research landscape. These changes have improved the ways to produce and distribute knowledge and information resources, but at same time have drawn the agents’ expectations in capturing and controlling the value of their research assets. The recent evolution of digital technology and knowledge base has created greater opportunities for the integration of different types of knowledge in networked environments and complementarity between increased computational power and greater scientific understanding.

However, the boundaries between basic and applied research have increasingly blurred, especially in those fields of science that refer to the “Pasteur’s Quadrant”. Being characterized by the achievement of practical objectives, research outputs in these sectors are the most susceptible to