Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/128

 will fuel this process by allowing bodies that do no teaching, but which hold degree awarding powers, to alter the material for their own ends (compiling it into a sort of online anthology or textbook) and to thereby undercut the research university on cost, leading to its extinction. This represents a serious danger to academic autonomy and the ﬁnancial cross-subsidisation of research from teaching. The standardisation and mass production of academic degrees, set by an external entity, is just another factor that would take the university ever further from its ideal as a community of self-organising scholars.50 Although Holmwood does not specify exactly how he envisages that such providers could not already use such material under the guise of ‘educational’ fair use, or by simply buying the material – which they could afford anyway – his argument is that there have been progressively more aggressive policy moves towards commercialisation of the university, particularly in the UK (with which is hard to disagree). Indeed, he notes that ‘universities are also enjoined to increase value for money for students through efﬁciency savings. Here the model is one of the “unbundling” of different activities, to identify those which can be taken to market by “outsourcing” and made subject to the proper rigours of the proﬁt-motive.’ However, in a parallel to education, Holmwood then goes on to note that ‘Open Access under CC BY is one of the measures designed to speed up commercialization, by making scientiﬁc innovations more immediately accessible, especially to small and medium-sized enterprises.’51 An analogous argument could certainly be made between the cultural industries and the humanities.

I do not dispute that this seems to tally with governmental agendas. For those who support open licensing but wish to counter such approaches, however, there are a variety of responses. Holmwood clearly supports the addition of the NC clause to licenses (his own book is CC BY-NC52), while I believe that ShareAlike would be a better solution to the same problem: ensuring that if others beneﬁt from the public work of academia, it remains a public good.

In this section, I have appraised some of the most common objections to the CC BY licenses: plagiarism and undesirable reuse. I remain unconvinced that plagiarism is a strong argument, but this is not a view universally held. The latter arguments about undesirable