concerns come in the wake of the UK government’s decision to
confer degree-awarding powers to entities that conduct no teaching,
such as Pearson.71 The worry here is that, at present, academics have
established a system of legitimation based upon community validation of standards. External bodies that seek to set examinations for
higher education while not teaching themselves could financially
undercut the research university by providing high-quality research
material free of charge (through open access), followed by an examination of students upon that material. This would present a severe
challenge not only to academic autonomy but to the continued
financial viability of the research university.72 These concerns echo
the political split that I outlined at the very outset of this book.
Holmwood argues that:
One of the main drivers of open access is to make academic research more easily available for commercial exploitation, especially by small and medium enterprises. In this context, it is significant that the licence under which open access should function is CC BY which enables commercial exploitation and reuse in any form. The consequence, for the natural sciences, or any other research with a directly exploitable commercial idea, is to bring the underlying research under the protection of Intellectual Property Rights.
Furthermore, according to Holmwood, the humanities and social sciences are also at risk:
First, let it be noted that the very commercialisation of the university itself will have the consequence of dividing the higher education system between a small number of elite universities and others subject to the pressures from for-profit providers . . . In this context, open access – especially MOOCS [Massive Open Online Courses] (and the online curriculum of Pearson) – provided by ‘elite’ universities is the means of undermining the conditions at other institutions and providing a tiered educational system that reinforces social selection to elite positions.
Equally significant, is that the argument for unbundling (some) universities [in which research and teaching are separated] is the claim that research is increasingly taking place outside universities . . . It is here that access to ‘big data’ provides commercial opportunities. Open access is an opportunity to amalgamate data from different sources, develop techniques of analysis under patent, and re-present data, and the means of checking any analysis using it, behind a new paywall.73
