Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/83

 ignores the institutional consequences of the marketplace conception of educational processes. . . Fourth, agency theory presents itself as a ‘positive’ methodology that claims to be superior in technique and result in the ‘normative’ kind of research that makes moral, philosophical, or emotional appeals to the academic community.42

The ubiquity of this model is problematic in many ways, but Hogler and Gross’s argument reveals the core of this system: the dominant political and societal narrative (whether one wishes it so or otherwise) is that university research is a commodity from which surplus value is to be extracted. In this context, there is a potentially dangerous political risk that the monetarily free nature of open access might hide this economic presence and thereby sustain the illusion that research work is a liberated, esoteric activity (especially in the humanities) whose areas of inquiry are determined autonomously and free of market pressures. It seems unlikely that this is true at the present moment or that open access would change this in the future. The narrative of the commodity character of research work seems here to stay.

The other aspect of labour that is potentially hidden through the zero-price point of open-access research is publishing. While open access to research presents an object as free, this is not to say that academic publishing can ever be conceived of as a labour-free enterprise. Regardless of how the process is framed, even without any allowance for proﬁt, publishers must be remunerated for their work. Indeed, publishing as it currently stands involves a value-chain of peer-review facilitation, typesetting (including XML or other formatting), copyediting, proofreading, design, printing, digital preservation, organisational membership (Committee on Publication Ethics, COUNTER [a body for the standardisation of usage metrics] and others), digital rights management and marketing, distribution, warehousing, as well as the more general costs of running a business (administration, accountancy, legal advice, trademark registration etc.).43 Open access certainly eliminates some of these costs: there is no point in implementing digital rights management – which protects content from unauthorised copying – on material that is free to access and licensed for unlimited third-party dissemination. It could also be argued that, in a service-provision model, many of these costs could be optional and paid at the discretion of the author; for instance, if an author is conﬁdent that he or she does not require