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 possible, which, albeit in the university press sector, was the driving logic behind the accumulated surpluses of Cambridge and Oxford University Presses in the 1980s and 1990s, according to Thompson.89 In another sense, though, it is problematic to have this tie to proﬁt/ surplus margins. It ﬁrstly discredits legitimate oppositions to aspects of open access when voiced by entities with (sometimes large) ﬁnancial stakes in the current model. Secondly, there is the problematic nature of competition (the ‘mini-monopoly’) in scholarly publishing that seems oddly placed to function within a competition-centred, free-market environment. Thirdly and ﬁnally, there is the additional difﬁculty, at present, of the way in which academics are shielded from the economic consequences of their publishing decisions and how this beneﬁts commercial organisations. In fact, advocate publishers in the sciences (such as PLOS – the Public Library of Science – originally a scientist-led enterprise that now runs the largest journal in the sciences) describe the present subscription scenario as a ‘systemic market failure’ because ‘authors have no price sensitivity when they choose a journal in which to publish’.90 By this they mean that the price of the library subscription to a journal, or cost of a book, is usually not considered by researchers in their choice of where to publish. Of course, if one is to accuse subscription/sale-based publishers of having an economic motivation for perpetuating one model, PLOS has a similarly strong motivation from the obverse, open-access perspective.

This lack of researcher awareness of the price of journals is, though, a type of academic freedom: it is freedom from price impinging on the selection of where to publish. Whether this liberty is a positive force could be debated. How important is it for the communication of research (rather than for the career of the researcher) in the digital age that academics have the ability to choose exactly where to publish with limited ﬁnancial awareness? Even if it remains important now, is it possible to foresee a time when it might not be? This phenomenon also represents, however, the way in which academics do not necessarily make for good rational market actors in this scenario. In the same way as students may not be rational agents in their choice of a university where they pay fees (what are their comparators if they’ve never been before and may never go again?), academics choose to publish on the basis of prestige