This is where open access plays a role, at least in one respect. OA
rests on a specific economic form called ‘nonrivalrous commodity
exchange’.37 This form, which requires digital dissemination, is one
wherein the ‘use’ of a commodity does not entail somebody else’s
inability to use it, meaning that the costs no longer inhere in
reproducing objects but instead in the labour required to create
the first copy. This is the case for digital content. When one
downloads a file this will not affect the next user’s ability to likewise
access that content in most normal circumstances because this is
essentially an act of near-instantaneous copying in which the original remains.38 This differs from the past systems of paper where,
for example, printing a book again and again came with a material
cost in each case because in selling a copy it was given away; one
cannot re-sell the physical object that one has just sold (not to
mention the costs of warehousing etc.). Under this new form of
nonrivalrous commodity exchange in which replication costs almost
disappear, if it were possible to allow anybody access to scholarly
material at no charge, covering instead the labour costs to first
copy, the demand-side problem would be eliminated. The ‘if’ in
that sentence is somewhat large and the supply-side problem is far
more difficult to broach without budget increases or cost reductions
but, broadly speaking, the problem of demand-side economics and
restricted access is one to which open access could be positioned
as a partial solution, predicated upon nonrivalrous commodity
exchange.
Free culture, copyright and an open ethos
Alongside the explosive growth of higher education and research output has been an enormous increase in technological capacity that it is also important to consider for an understanding of the emergence of open access. Indeed, the overwhelming assumption from the literature on open scholarship is that it has co-evolved with broader technological developments.39 Although much of the recent history of computing technology is ensconced within commercial and military paradigms, it is also the birthplace of the free culture movement. Counter-intuitively, this stems from the fact that the historical rise of general-purpose computing to mainstream
