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 It is notable that much humanities work criticises the individualist nature of neoliberal late capital, particularly in literary and sociological ﬁelds, while also clinging to single-authored works as the benchmark of quality. Indeed, despite Foucault’s well-known observations on the ‘death of the author’, Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford have picked up on the degree to which there are ‘disjunctures or contradictions between theory and practice in the academy’, noting that ‘Literary scholars such as Jonathan Arac, James Sosnoski, Evan Watkins, Maria-Regina Kecht, and Paul Bove have pointed out the extent to which contemporary academic practices in English studies constitute, as Sosnoski puts it in the title of his 1995 study, “modern skeletons in postmodern closets”.’ Indeed, as they go on, ‘In his In the Wake of Theory, Bove explores the relation of theory and practice in English studies, noting that too often scholars have assumed “that ‘theory-work’ somehow would or could stand outside the given realities of our time and place” (5). Similarly, in Work Time Watkins calls attention to the importance of acknowledging that “actual practices of resistance depend on speciﬁc working conditions” and to the danger of “the dream of transubstantiation” – the dream that work done in one location (the writing of an article or a book, for instance) will effect political change in another location (28–29).’ Lisa Ede and Andrea A. Lunsford, ‘Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship’, PMLA, 116 (2001), 354–69 (p. 356).

Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 233.

Steve Hitchcock, ‘The Effect of Open Access and Downloads (“hits”) on Citation Impact: A Bibliography of Studies’, 2013 http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html [accessed 21 April 2014]; Alma Swan, ‘The Open Access Citation Advantage: Studies and Results to Date’, 2010 http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/268516/ [accessed 24 March 2014]. While advocates would claim that this ‘citation beneﬁt’ is evidence of broader use of material, the counter-argument of sceptics is that such a focus could prioritise accessibility over relevance or appropriateness.

This is an extremely common misconception about OA. See Thiede, ‘On Open Access Evangelism’.

Robin Osborne, ‘Why Open Access Makes No Sense’, in Debating Open Access (London: British Academy, 2013), pp. 96–105 (p. 104).

Osborne, ‘Why Open Access Makes No Sense’, p. 97.

Osborne, ‘Why Open Access Makes No Sense’, p. 104.

Osborne, ‘Why Open Access Makes No Sense’, pp. 104–5.

I am well aware, following Thomas Docherty, that the term ‘taxpayer’ is a hideously loaded phrase that summons to mind a miserly caricature who believes only in self-gain; one that probably doesn’t actually exist.