university digital freedoms access knowledge universities should make all

Public funding does not mean that everything should be free and open to use by the public. We do not expect to be allowed to use buildings that are built as government offices as if they were our own. The government builds large amounts of infrastructure such as airports and railways but we don’t expect to be able to use them for free.

Most universities are publically funded so should have to be open with their materials.  The United States University system is famously expensive and as a result it is probably the system in a developed country that has least public funding yet $346.8billion was spent, mostly by the states, on higher education in 2008-9. [1] In Europe almost 85% of universities funding came from government sources. [2] Considering the huge amounts of money spent on universities by taxpayers they should be able to demand access to the academic work those institutions produce.  Even in countries where there are tuition fees that make up some of the funding for the university it is right that the public should have access to these materials as the tuition fees are being paid for the personal teaching time provided by the lecturers not for the academics’ publications. Moreover those who have paid for a university course would benefit by the materials still being available to access after they have finished university  [1] Caplan, Bruan, “Correction: Total Government Spending on Higher Education”, Library of Economics and Liberty, 16 November 2012,   [2] Vught, F., et al., “Funding Higher Education: A View Across Europe”, Ben Jongbloed Center for Higher Education Policy Studies University of Twente, 2010.

Open access makes little difference to research. If an academic needs to use an article they don’t have access to they can pay for it and gain access quickly and efficiently.  The benefits to the economy may also be overstated; we don’t know how much benefit it will create. But we do know it would be badly damaging to the academic publishing industry. We also know there are risks with putting everything out in the open as economies that are currently research leaders will be handing out their advances for free. There is an immense amount of stealing of intellectual property, up to $400 billion a year, so research is obviously considered to be economically worth something. [1] With open access the proposal is instead to make everything available for free for others to take as and when they wish.  [1] Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, “Backgrounder on the Rogers-Ruppersberger Cybersecurity Bill”, U.S. House of Representatives,

Opens up education  Higher education, as with other levels of education, should be open to all. Universities are universally respected as the highest form of educational institution available and it is a matter of principle that everyone should have access to this higher level of education. Unfortunately not everyone in the world has this access usually because they cannot afford it, but it may also be because they are not academically inclined. This does not however mean that it is right to simply cut them off from higher educational opportunities. Should those who do not attend university not have access to the same resources as those who do?  This can have an even greater impact globally than within an individual country. 90% of the world’s population currently have no access to higher education. Providing access to all academic work gives them the opportunities that those in developed countries already have. [1]  [1] Daniel, Sir John, and Killion, David, “Are open educational resources the key to global economic growth?”, Guardian Professional, 4 July 2012,

Making these academic materials available to the general public does not mean they are useful to anyone. Many of the materials universities produce are not useful unless the reader has attended the relevant lectures. Rather than simply putting those lectures that are recorded and course handbooks online what is needed to open up education is systematically designed online courses that are available to all. Unfortunately what this provides will be a profusion of often overlapping and contradictory materials with little guidance for how to navigate through them for those who are not involved in the course in question.

Most students most of the time stick to the core areas of their course and thus are not likely to encounter difficulties with finding the relevant information. For those who do require resources that the university library does not have access to they can use interlibrary loan for a small fee to cover the cost of sending the book or article between universities. [1] The universities in most countries can therefore effectively split the cost of access by specialising in certain subjects which limits the number of journals they need to buy while making the resources available to their students if they really need them.  [1] Anon., “Inter-library loans” Birkbeck University of London.  Within the UK Cambridge charges £3 to £6,  in Europe the University of Vienna charges €2  while the United States is higher with Yale charging between $20-30

Openness benefits research and the economy  Open access can be immensely beneficial for research. It increases the speed of access to publications and opens research up to a wider audience. [1] Some of the most important research has been made much more accessible due to open access. The Human Genome Project would have been an immense success either way but it is doubtful that its economic impact of $796billion would have been realised without open access.  The rest of the economy benefits too. It has been estimated that switching to open access would generate £100million of economic activity in the United Kingdom as a result of reduced research costs for business and shorter development as a result of being able to access a much broader range of research. [2]  [1] Anon., “Open access research advantages”, University of Leicester,   [2] Carr, Dave, and Kiley, Robert, “Open access to science helps us all”, New Statesman, 13 April 2012.

Students would be able to benefit from being able to use resources at other universities  Having paid for access to universities and the materials they provide for research students have a right to expect that they will have all the necessary materials available. Unfortunately this is not always the case. University libraries are unable to afford all the university journals they wish to have access to or need for their courses. Therefore any student who wants to go into areas not anticipated by the course they are enrolled with will find that they do not have access to the materials they require. They then face the cost of getting individual access to an online journal article which can be up to $42, despite there being almost zero marginal cost to the publisher. [1] This even affects the biggest and best resourced university libraries. Robert Darnton the director of Harvard University’s library which pays $3.5million per year for journal articles says “The system is absurd” and “academically restrictive” instead “the answer will be open-access journal publishing”. [2]  [1] Sciverse, “Pay-per-view”, Elsevier,   [2] Sample, Ian, “Harvard University says it can’t afford journal publishers’ prices”, The Guardian, 24 April 2012.

The vast majority of people who go to University are not doing so simply because they are interested in a subject and want to find out more. Instead they are after the qualification and improved job prospects university provides. Even those few who are in large part studying out of curiosity and interest will likely be doing so at university because they like the student life and want the experience.  However having courses and materials out in the open can even help universities with recruitment. Providing open access boosts a university’s reputation abroad which helps it in the international student market. Open access to academic work also helps give potential students a much better idea with what they will be studying which is very useful for students who are unsure where to choose. The benefits are obvious as shown by 35% of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s students choose the university after looking at its OpenCourseWare. [1]  [1] Daniel, Sir John, and Killion, David, “Are open educational resources the key to global economic growth?”, Guardian Professional, 4 July 2012,

Academic work is not about profit. For most researchers the aim is to satisfy curiosity or to increase the sum of knowledge. Others are motivated by a desire to do good, or possibly for recognition. None of these things require there to be profit for the university.  Moreover we should remember that the profit is not going to the individual who did the research, there is therefore no moral justification that the person has put effort in and so deserves to profit from it. The university does not even take the risk, which is born by the taxpayer who pays the majority of the research budget. Much of the profit from publishing this knowledge does not even go to the university. Instead academic publishers make huge profits through rentier capitalism. They have profit margins of 36% despite not doing the research, or taking any risk that goes into funding the research. [1]  [1] Monbiot, George, “Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist”, The Guardian, 29 August 2011,

Making everything free to access will damage universities ability to tap private funding  For most universities even if the government is generous with funding it will still need for some projects require private funding. When providing money for research projects the government often requires cost sharing so the university needs to find other sources of funding. [1] Third parties however are unlikely to be willing to help provide funding for research if they know that all the results of that research will be made open to anyone and everyone. These businesses are funding specific research to solve a particular problem with the intention of profiting from the result. Even if universities themselves don’t want to profit from their research they cannot ignore the private funding as it is rapidly growing, up 250% in the U.S. from 1985-2005, while the government support is shrinking. [2]  [1] Anon. (November 2010), “Research &amp; Sponsored Projects”, University of Michigan.   [2] Schindler, Adam, “Follow the Money Corporate funding of university research”, Berkley Science Review, Issue 13.

Who will write and edit the work?  You can’t take the end result out of the system and assume all the rest of it will continue as usual. Journal articles don’t write themselves; there will still be costs for editors, typesetters, reviewing etc., as well as the time and cost of the writer. The average cost of publishing an article is about £4000. [1]  There have been two suggested forms of open access ‘Gold’ in which authors pay publishers article publication charges and ‘Green’ under which the author self-archives their papers in open access repositories. The gold option that the UK intends to implement could mean universities having to find an extra £60million a year. [2] In either case the cost is being put on the author.  This is exactly the same when asking academics to put their lectures, lecture notes, bibliographies etc online. They are being asked to put in more hours grappling with technology without being paid for it.  [1] Moghaddam, Golnessa Galyani, “Why Are Scholarly Journals Costly even with Electronic Publishing?”  p.9  [2] Ayris, Paul, “Why panning for gold may be detrimental to open access research”, Guardian Professional, 23 July 2012.

Less incentive to study at university  If everything that University provides is open to all then there is less incentive to study at university. Anyone who is studying in order to learn about a subject rather than achieve a particular qualification will no longer need to attend the university in order to fulfil their aim. The actual benefit of university education is less in learning content per se than engaging with new ideas critically, something that is frequently more difficult in an online environment.  Moreover if only some countries or institutions were to implement such open access then it makes more sense for any students who are intending to study internationally to go elsewhere as they will still be able to use the resources made available by that university. Open access if not implemented universally is therefore damaging to universities attempts to attract lucrative international students who often pay high tuition fees.

Universities deserve to profit from their work  Universities are providing a service just like almost any other business. They provide a service in terms of educating students who are enrolled with them and secondly they conduct research on a wide range of subjects. In both of these cases the university deserves to make a profit out of their work.  When acting as an educator universities are in an educational free market, this is the case even when the cost is provided by the state. All universities are aiming to attract as many students as possible and earn as much as possible from fees. If the university is successful it will be able to charge more as it will attract students from further afield.  While Universities may make a profit on research or even teaching this profit is for the benefit of society as a whole as the profits are usually simply reinvested in the University’s education and infrastructure. [1]  [1] Anon. “What does the money get spent on?” The University of Sheffield, 2013.

This is trying to pull the wool over the eyes of those who fund the research in the first place; the taxpayer. The taxpayer (or in some cases private funder) pays for the research to be done and so is paying for the paper to be written. It then does not make sense that the taxpayer should pay again in order to access the research that they paid to have done in the first place. Yes there are small costs associated with checking and editing the articles but these could easily be added into research budgets especially as it would mean cutting out an extra cost that occurs due to the profit margins of the academic publishers. As Neelie Kroes, European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda, says “Taxpayers should not have to pay twice for scientific research”. [1]  [1] Kroes, Neelie, “Scientific data: open access to research results will boost Europe's innovation capacity”, Europa.eu, 17 July 2012.

If business wants certain research to use for profit then it is free to do so. However it should entirely fund that research rather than relying on academic institutions to do the research and the government to come up with part of the funding. This would then allow the government to focus its funding on basic research, the kind of research that pushes forward the boundaries of knowledge which may have many applications but is not specifically designed with these in mind. This kind of curiosity driven research can be very important for example research into retroviruses gave the grounding that meant that antiretrovirals to control AIDS were available within a decade of the disease appearing. [1]  [1] Chakradhar, Shraddha, “The Case for Curiosity”, Harvard Medical School, 10 August 2012,