(a form of symbolic capital) and often do not know (or care), in a subscription/sale environment, how much their choice of journal or book venue costs.91 This is due not just to publisher bundling practices and non-disclosure agreements, although these contribute, but rather to the fact that academics publish and consume but it is libraries that purchase. As non-rational actors will not get the best deal for themselves under market logic, this type of academic freedom – the freedom from knowing/directly bearing the financial consequences of one’s actions – happens also to benefit commercial entities. Conversely, though, even the supposedly rational actors – libraries, that is – cannot get a good result out of this situation. Indeed, at least in the sciences, it has been shown that price does not correlate with quality but rather that ‘libraries typically must pay 4 to 6 times as much per page for journals owned by commercial publishers as for journals owned by non-profit societies’.92 Of course, commercial publishers are not always the stereotypical villains that some OA advocates make them out to be and so some of the arguments set out below on the oppositions of university presses, learned societies and even academics will also apply to commercial publishers. That said, at least a few of the oppositions of commercial publishers to OA, where they have been voiced, must be on grounds of finance, whether that be profit or sustainability.
University press and learned society publishers’ oppositions to open access
That this certainty of income stream has benefits can be seen in a different group of publishers: those of learned societies and university presses (UPs). While both can technically also be called ‘commercial’ in various senses, they often have very different agendas and histories and, where they object to open access, it can be for very different reasons. It is worth noting, upfront, that there are UPs and learned societies who have wholeheartedly embraced open access. The Linguistic Society of America (LSA), for instance, launched the open-access journal Semantics and Pragmatics in 2007. This journal does not levy article processing charges and instead receives sponsorship from the MIT Library, the MIT Department of Linguistics & Philosophy, the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social
