Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/79

 that situates academic freedom within a history of censorship, these doctrines refer to the full freedom to publish the work without fear of institutional or government reprisal, not to the choice of where to publish it, an aspect more strongly reﬂected in the wording of the UK’s legislation. This can already be seen in the fact that journals and presses are allowed to reject academic work on grounds of quality (for both journals and books) and marketability (usually only for books), aspects that are not explicitly mentioned in these statements on academic freedom but which already limit the ability to publish wherever one would like.

In any case, the backlash against article and book processing charges has triggered investigations into a range of new models that seek to provide gold open access in a sustainable fashion without any author-facing charges, the third setup proposed above. Under such models – covered extensively below in ‘How can open access be affordable for the humanities?’ – many libraries each pay a small amount in order to sustain a large-scale infrastructure. It is thought by proponents that an extension of the service model in this way could prove less damaging and more amenable to the community, especially in the transition phase. Several projects, which often take the form of library consortial arrangements, including arXiv, SCOAP3, Knowledge Unlatched and the Open Library of Humanities, are currently investigating whether these models are favourable for libraries and/or feasible at scale.31

These consortial models are interesting because they operate, economically, less on the basis of competition and more on cooperation. When libraries cooperate to fund gold OA initiatives, the transition period and subsequent implementation could potentially look less damaging with the cost spread over a larger number of institutions. Such models, though, do not sit harmoniously within the present, dominant business context of free-market competition. As I have argued, however, the fact that there are inherent micro-monopolies in scholarly publishing (i.e. the unique nature of each published artefact) means that it is difﬁcult to construct marketplaces to which such notions of competition directly apply. Instead, I would argue, we need to understand the commodity character of research within market economies more fully, an aspect to which I will now turn.