Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/74



From the preceding observations on value-ascription and assessment in the humanities, it is clear that the ﬁnances of scholarly publishing are in part determined by a complex set of socio-academic factors. From such thinking, however, and now beginning to move towards the purely ﬁnancial side of open access, a fresh set of questions emerge. Why is open access peculiar to the university? Why, uniquely, should the university be forced to give its work away for free? Beyond this, if there were satisfactory answers to the preceding two questions, if the academy were able to give away its work for free through open access, would this present a point of resistance to the commodiﬁcation of higher education and research outputs, given that something that is monetarily free looks as though it has no exchange value?

To think through such questions, it is necessary to begin with an observation that the theoretical premise on which the labour of academic scholarship rests is one where the author is paid an academic salary, part of which covers the production of research work. While this is sometimes supplemented by external grant income, it is also important to note that a vast quantity of humanities research work is undertaken on institutional (and sometimes personal) time. As touched upon above, this theoretical model yields a very good rationale for why scholars should give away their work: they are happily divorced from the need to sell research for a ﬁnancial return. While some scholars may wish to gain supplemental income from selling their work, in most cases such returns are too small to make a tangible difference. Instead, academics see a longer term payoff in the form of reputation, which leads to promotion and eventual material self-gain, on top of the anticipated beneﬁt to society through academic research. This is a good model because it moves academic work beyond the realm of popular market appeal. This means that niche investigations into important, but unpopular, areas can be published. However, as with many theoretical models, it can be difﬁcult to pair the rhetoric to the reality. Contingent faculty who exist on short-term contracts under precarious labour conditions with no guarantee of work on a term-by-term basis make a mockery of this ideal system. This is clearly demonstrated by the existence of