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Scholarship and the commodity form

In order to understand why market-orientated governments are keen on open access, which seems based on a more egalitarian premise than would usually be palatable to them, it is necessary to consider the economic use-values and sites of exchange of published research. As covered above in the section on objections to open access in the humanities, one core point of contention is the way in which open licensing could lead to reappropriation of university research by external commercial entities. It is true that this seems to be the goal of many government OA mandates: to ensure a link between university and industry. However, what happens when that link feeds companies and activities that pose a risk to the research university itself? In this part of this chapter I will look at the next point of value and economics in relation to humanities scholarship: the bundling of research work as a commodity object. This will not only enable an examination of some of the points where the use and exchange values of research are realised but also make it possible to think through the potential changes that open access might engender in this sphere. In other words: is open access a way in which the commodity form of research can be resisted since it is given away for free (the ‘gift’), or is it complicit with deeper utilitarian, industrial exploitation (‘use value’)?

Given the nature of research production and remuneration in the university, it can superﬁcially appear that the research work of the academy is different in its terms of production from other manufactured commodities. After all, as we have seen, in the ideal situation, academics are paid a salary in order to give their work away; a rare situation of patronage in contemporary economics. This can lead the more optimistic opponents of marketised higher education to deduce that open access might present a point of resistance to the commodiﬁcation of knowledge. In fact, such an argument would run, what could better resist this process than work that is, in two senses, priceless? Sadly, as I will show, such a conclusion is ﬂawed. Open-access research is not radically anti-corporate, as Jeffrey Beall’s accusation against the movement suggests and, indeed, a Marxist analysis of the commodity form of open-access material will conﬁrm this.32 On top of this, while academic papers, whether open access or not,