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Rh commercial exploitation and economic return. Further, as technical routines that represent valuable know-how have been increasingly incorporated on or near the face of research tools and materials, subsequent innovators could duplicate without incurring the time and costs of reverse-engineering.

As a result, although there are greater opportunities for the exchange and integration of knowledge, there has been a growing trend towards building up barriers to the access and use of information resources with the objective to appropriate the value of research outputs. The expansion of intellectual property rights, the creation of sui generis regimes and the adoption of restrictive licensing strategies are common institutional responses that have proliferated in almost all the fields of knowledge production. In addition, because of the highly diversified environment of R&D, characterized by great heterogeneity of players in the public and private sector, the enclosure movement has followed a “domino effect”. The privatisation pressure that has been initially supported by some players internal to the system has created a shifting balance in favour of proprietary interests. This has eventually led to defensive reactions by other players, who conform to the changes in the legal framework by adopting exclusionary strategies against the erosion of open access models.

While the adoption of exclusionary and proprietary strategies is usually justified with the objective to appropriate the value of research and to enhance a market-based allocation of research inputs, this move has been perceived to generate unintended consequences and to engender negative effects to the flow of resources in R&D activities. Many commentators have highlighted the risk that the new institutional settings may stifle scientific production and innovation because of the increase in transaction costs, the erosion of norms of science in the dissemination of knowledge or the emergence of strategic behaviour in the integration of complementary information resources. These concerns have found a powerful metaphor in the tragedy of anti-commons. Further, the new scenario tends to have a