However you view these events individually, they seem symptomatic of an increasingly dysfunctional relationship between academics and publishers. This wasn’t always the case; what had been a mutually beneficial relationship has begun to feel more exploitative. As Edwards and Shulenberger(2002) put it: ‘Beginning in the late 1960s and early ’70s, this gift exchange began to break down. A few commercial publishers recognized that research generated at public expense and given freely for publication by the authors represented a commercially exploitable commodity.’
Why did this happen? Part of the reason was the shift to digital. In the last chapter I stressed that the digital, networked nature of open education was fundamental. The open access publishing field demonstrates why it is so important. In theory, the same restrictions existed previously under the print model, but when academics had no real control over the distribution channel, it didn’t matter in any practical sense. Signing copyright forms with publishers meant surrendering film or merchandise rights, but Hollywood rarely came calling for academic authors, so it had no practical impact. Authors were free to distribute photocopies on request or to use them in their own teaching. Given the barriers to distributing copies, this had no impact on the publishers, so author and publisher could exist in a reasonably mutually beneficial relationship. But once the content became digital and could be freely distributed, the nature of this relationship changed and the interests of each party became antagonistic. The author now wants to retain the right to freely distribute as before, but now that the barriers to doing so have been removed, the damage to the business of the publisher is more substantial.
In each of the examples of conflict I stated at the beginning of this section, it is the digital, networked nature of the publishing approach that is at the heart of the dispute. The takedown notices
