This gives academics freedom of enquiry. They don't have to research things that will only sell. They can afford to (and they do) give away their work for free. The desire is to be read and valued so that one can get an academic post, get tenure, get promoted, etc.



Copyright, on the other hand, is a time-limited monopoly on the right to sell the result of intellectual labor. Because academics do not need to sell their work, they also don't need the economic protections of copyright. Publishers do (if they sell work) but academics don't.

What academics want is reputational protection. They want to be cited. Open licensing provides a way in which academics can let others use their work more liberally than if it were covered totally by copyright but always with the demand for attribution, which fuels their systems of prestige, hiring, etc.

We designed a system to free academics from the market. We then came up with a model for research dissemination that entailed selling work (i.e., is market based).

Berlatsky: You point out that the sciences have many more free or un-paywalled journals than the humanities. Is that because there's more of a public and business interest in scientific research? And I guess more broadly, is there really enough interest outside the academy in humanities work to make free access much of an issue one way or the other?



Eve: To the first question: perhaps. There's definitely a drive by center-right governments to open up scientific research so that it can be commercially exploited. It's far harder to envisage what such commercial exploitation of humanities research might look like (although the "cultural industries" are all sites of external value extraction).

On the second point: I think there is enough interest outside the academy, but that is only half of the story.



For the public: We claim that the humanities have value in a democracy for the ability to spur critical thinking in the liberal humanist tradition. I can't see how the university can fulfill that role if people come to university for three years [or four years in the U.S.] and are then kicked out without access. [Large portions] of the population now have humanities degrees and enjoyed their time studying. There isn't ready exposure in the wider world to the work, though, for them to continue this at the moment.



Even if you don't buy that line, though, open access is not just about the public. The cost of subscribing to all research journals needed has risen by 300 percent above inflation since 1986 while academic library budgets have only risen by 79 percent total.



This means that even Harvard has cancelled subscriptions on the basis of price. Some publishers make a great deal of profit from this. So, going back to my original point, we now have a system where researchers are free to investigate what they like—independent of the market—but they disseminate through channels that frequently deny their fellow researchers access to material for market-based reasons.