Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/61



Digital economics

In light of the discussion in the previous chapter it is clear that open access is a phenomenon embroiled in the ﬁelds of economics and value. However, systems of economics and value in scholarly communication/publishing are determined not solely in ﬁnancial terms but also in the exchange of symbolic capital. There are, in fact, many different complex and intersecting social and ﬁnancial economies of value that make up the landscape. Although interdependent, these systems can be broken down into questions of quality and value as socially ascribed and questions of ﬁnance in terms of labour value and capital (even if the latter are, also, social at their core). The ﬁrst of these modes covers the aspects that make a journal or publisher prestigious and the economics that regulate this symbolic ﬁeld. The second encroaches upon questions of ﬁnance, including, but not limited to, asking who pays how much for the labour of academic publishing.

In this chapter, I devote time to each of these issues in turn, beginning with a dissection of academic prestige, followed by a more thorough discussion of the assertion that scholars are well placed to give away their work. Given that humanities research is sometimes thought of outside the sphere of monetary exchange, often with no clear practical use-value, this entails an analysis of the commodity form of open-access research work, including the question of whether work that is given away for free assists in a decommodiﬁcation of the research production of the contemporary university. I then move to examine the practical business models for gold OA and the evidence for a model of green in parallel to subscriptions. Finally, I look at the international contexts within which this discussion sits, given that the fear of isolationism exists alongside concerns 43