Open Access and Neoliberalism

"It is often remarked that solutions must be social, not technological. Yet this surely must mean that the problems should also be deemed social, and not technological. In their chapter ‘Challenges to Public Universities: Digitalization, Commodification, and Precarity’, Holmwood and Marcuello-Servós make many points with which I agree. The widespread marketization of contemporary academia and the worrying encroachment of for-profit providers, who do not share the values of the university as it should be, are dangerous phenomena that must be resisted. Their comments on precarity are particularly timely when recently university staff in the United Kingdom embarked on waves of strike action to defend against this very phenomenon.

There is a point in this chapter, though, with which I strongly disagree and that I here wish to contend, at the risk of losing the broader worthwhile argument. I pick on it because it is a point that Holmwood has made several times before (but also because it is my research specialism and bugbear): that open access to research work will benefit vulture-like private providers of higher education and lead to the eradication of the public university (Holmwood 2013a, 2013b, 2017, 2018, 2020)...."