Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/60

 responses that both decried the lack of evidence in his piece and noted that such a stance was unusual among librarians. One article even suggested that a ‘Randian worldview’ was the most plausible explanation for his stance.107 That said, there are, of course, anticorporatists who support OA (and, naturally, ‘anti-corporatist’ need not be a McCarthyite pejorative term) but there are also a large number of corporate publishers who do likewise. Where there are library-rooted objections to OA, then, they can intersect with concerns about quality and ﬁnance, but are also usually also related to anxieties surrounding the future role of the library and Beall remains a marginal, albeit loud, voice.



These form the core points of dissent with respect to open access in the humanities: fundamental objections to the principle; objections to speciﬁc implementations (including article or book processing charges and open licensing); objections on corporate-economic grounds; and objections around the future of the library. More broadly, this chapter has covered three speciﬁc background elements to open access: the history of the movement; the exceptionality (or otherwise) of the humanities; and the aforementioned objections. It should be apparent, I hope, to all readers that while open access is a theoretically simple idea, that simplicity hides a multitude of complexities. Whether these be ﬁnancial, scholarly or even political, it is clear that OA is caught between stakeholders with a variety of motivations and levels of power. While these debates continue to rage, they can only be understood in totality through detailed examinations of the contexts within which they take place. In order to do so, over the next three chapters – on economics, open licensing and monographs – I further explore the terrain in the hope of more accurately charting the phenomenon of open access.