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110 in promoting the dissemination of knowledge under social sharing mechanisms.

However, this optimism has to find a balance with the third economic issue, which concerns institutional change and mechanism of expectation formation. As noted before, contractually based research commons represent new institutional arrangements that lower the frictions for the exchange of research assets. For this reason, they will have to interact and compete with the other institutional mechanisms developed by agents and that are currently at play for favouring transactions. As the dynamic of institutions and institutional change is deeply rooted in the system of agents’ beliefs and expectations, path dependence and collective action dynamics will inevitably affect the adoption and long standing viability of research commons initiatives.

One of the main challenges is therefore to understand whether the increasing adoption of exclusive strategies can be reverted by changing the system of agents’ beliefs and expectations that have generated the domino effect towards the enclosure movement. Putting contractually-based research commons in a comprehensive evolutionary perspective suggests that these initiatives are endogenous responses occurring in the complex ecology of research and scientific activity. As a result, imitative dynamics may be relevant even if small groups among the research communities start adopting or constructing contractually-based research commons.