OA isn’t free, it costs folks like you and me

Abstract

Despite the framing of open access (OA) as a progressive movement that challenges neoliberalism and champions the public good, academic labour is often left out of these analyses (Eve, 2017). In a bid to liberate academic labour from the neoliberal hands of commercial publishing, advocates of OA have argued that making scholarly work “free” can help to establish an academic commons (de Rosnay, 2021). However initiatives to mandate OA in academia like “Plan S” set the stage for academic labourers to be compelled to give up rights to their intellectual property (Frantzvag & Stromme, 2019). In this essay I argue that the broad acceptance of OA as the liberatory savior of academic publishing is misguided, as it obscures the right-wing libertarian roots of the movement and would see academics voluntarily alienate themselves from their labour (Golumbia, 2016). Drawing on Golumbia’s (2016) Marxist reading of the political economy of OA, I argue that devaluing academic labour by characterizing it as unproductive and immaterial negates the abstract labour that produces scholarly works. Undoubtedly, libraries have an important role to play in the OA “revolution” (Burns, 2018), although not as assenting boosters but as critical voices that advocate for the rights of workers.