Pollution has been a common threat to the sustainability of commons resources. While there now exist plenty of safeguards addressing the consequences of pollution on natural resources, little attention has been given to those on the knowledge commons. To understand how pollution occurs and is tackled in the knowledge commons, I take the case of a subset of the life science knowledge commons – the Gene Regulation Knowledge Commons (GRKC). Members from the gene regulation community have come together to work towards a knowledge commons under the Gene Regulation Ensemble Effort for the Knowledge Commons (“GREEKC”). Their efforts have been directed at coordinating and aligning the various practices of data management that prevail across different databases pertaining to gene regulation knowledge. The end goal is to establish a standard framework for knowledge management for GRKC. By examining the polluting practices that arise in the GRKC and how this pollution is alleviated, I claim that here, manually curated databases discern between knowledge that is pure or polluted. However, being a part of the same commons do these databases draw the same distinctions between what is pure and what is polluted? Or do different databases arrive at different conclusions? Is what is pure for one also pure for all?
Dealing with different conceptions of pollution in the Gene Regulation Knowledge Commons
