Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/93

 which even those who do not pay receive the beneﬁts and (2) the difﬁculty for such initiatives of ﬁnding the optimum balance point between the level of contribution and number of institutions.

The ﬁrst of these difﬁculties, the so-called ‘free-rider’ problem, relates to the economic understanding that rationally self-interested actors do not wish to pay for commodities from which others beneﬁt for free. In other words, except in philanthropic modes or systems of taxation for public good, most people usually resist paying for goods for which only they pay, but from which non-purchasers also derive beneﬁt.70 This results, for gold open access publishing, in a kind of prisoner’s dilemma. If all library entities behave in a purely self-interested way and disallow free riders, these collectively underwritten, non-APC models cannot emerge. Admittedly, the increasing enclosure of universities within market logics doubtless makes it harder for acquisition librarians to justify expenditure on projects where there are free riders to senior managers. That said, as Rebecca Bliege Bird and Eric Alden Smith point out, the ‘generosity’ of participation in such initiatives is not devoid of return to member institutions. Indeed, as they note, ‘individually costly but collectively beneﬁcial (or at least prestigious) behaviors such as public generosity or extravagant piety are a form of social competition: the most generous or self-sacriﬁcial individuals gain higher prestige, and the recipients or observers gain material beneﬁt at the expense of their own prestige’.71 In this light, there is a potential direct return to institutions who behave generously, even in the face of free riders. This aside, through institutional cooperation it becomes possible to build scholarly communication systems that are not feasible within systems of pure market economics. arXiv recognises this problem and notes that ‘arXiv’s sustainability should be considered a shared investment in a culturally embedded resource that provides unambiguous value to a global network of science researchers. Any system of voluntary contribution is susceptible to free-riders, but arXiv is extremely cost-effective, so even modest contributions from heavy-user institutions will support continued open access for all while providing good value-for-money when compared with subscription services.’72 If a similar business model was shown to be viable for the humanities, one that also covered the costs of coordinating peer review but that was still collectively underwritten, many of the fears about the exclusionary aspects of article and book processing charges for gold OA could potentially be reduced.