I regularly attend and present at the Charleston Conference each year in November. It’s a fantastic conference dominated by some of the brightest and most agile thinkers in scholarly publishing and academic libraries. And regularly I hear the term “free rider” bandied about. It is typically mentioned in passing, as in “…and then there’s free rider problem of this.” What is implied is that there is a group of libraries that ostensibly participate in, or at least stand to benefit from, the significant share of the Open Access (OA) scholarly publishing that is supported by larger academic libraries (and their parent institutions).
As a designation, the Free Rider Problem (FRP) seems accurate on the surface. ‘Us larger institutions are working hard to produce as much OA content as we can, despite how complicated this all is for us, and smaller institutions aren’t producing much of it but they are able to read it in spades’ goes the thinking, if I’m correct. It’s yet one more factor in an overwhelmingly complicated discussion that is often assumed to be a stable category.
But a closer look reveals the category doesn’t really hold. As I’ve cued into this dynamic over the past several years, I’ve realized this is an area worth further exploration as it would seem to get at the relationship between institutions of differents sizes and missions. I’m presenting a poster (and I definitely feel like a graduate student again) at the Charleston Conference this fall on the subject and am trying out my thinking on the topic.
So here goes: the primary problem with applying the label FRP to smaller libraries is that the free rider framing requires certain conditions to be met. In the case of smaller libraries, they simply aren’t. In the current lament, I hear two types of institutions configured: large and small. Large, as in those that can afford to produce a significant amount of OA output and, small, those who can’t.
The primary problem with applying the label FRP to smaller libraries is that the free rider framing requires certain conditions to be met. In the case of smaller libraries, they simply aren’t.
For my part, the phrase is out of place and dismissive as it targets a disadvantaged audience caught in a vicious cycle. While smaller institutions do consume OA output but typically produce very little and larger institutions consume and contribute much, the term runs afoul in its lack of a more nuanced consideration of just what the FRP is and isn’t in the context of OA and academic libraries.
Tthe classic FRP as stated by Olson in the 1960s and developed by many others over the years, implies an even marketplace or commons where rationale actors look after their best interests. The main idea is that those choosing to free ride estimate that their own contribution will have minimal impact on the commons as a whole and therefore decide not to contribute, thereby allowing others to bear the cost. All is mostly well and good until you get into large-scale collective action scenarios where everyone gets the benefit and only a few shoulder the cost. But the key word here is “choosing to free ride.”
A modern example would be climate change. Assuming that reducing carbon emissions alone would stabilize the climate, everyone in the world benefits but the costs of action are borne by specific companies, nations, and individuals. I know the costs of climate change and the incentives and economies to participate and evade make for a bewildering array of national policy and regulation landscapes across competing countries that result in unclear outcomes, but bear with me.
For smaller academic libraries, the only choices there are these days are forced. There is no choice in the matter to free ride if there simply are no funds to produce one’s own contribution back. Our funds are caught up in ongoing subscriptions that…you know the story, the prices goes up and our budgets go down. There’s limited room for APCs and transformative agreements are challenging because of the lack of coherence around disciplinary areas that a smaller group of faculty can publish in. Our money is locked into READ and PUBLISH is a bridge too far much of the time.
But I’m relishing the victim status here, bordering as I am on a grievance I’m not trying to claim. So allow me to play devil’s advocate and argue against myself. The broadest possible use of the term applies at a general level to open-access publishing. The costs are carried by institutions, researchers, and grantmaking bodies while the work is open to all. The devil’s advocate position is worth entertaining, because it helps us keep in mind that free riding probably isn’t offered maliciously. Rather, the term cues us into the structural dimension of the concept, which is more of a byproduct of the very openness that makes Open Access worth our time.
But you can continue this argument all the way to absurdity: anyone who consumes Open Access content is technically a free rider if they don’t directly fund it. The structural framework shows how OA is meant to maximize access, not gatekeep and measure participation. Calling smaller libraries in this fashion then risks missing the fundamental point about the purpose of OA in the first place.
And as a gratuitous aside that serves as my conclusion: the free rider designation is simply inappropriate discursively. It is put forth as if it its utterance has some of the rhetorical heft needed to effect a change in the behavior of smaller libraries. It doesn’t do any such given that a steadier and heavier reality presses on smaller libraries and institutions. The term suggests that smaller libraries are failing in their duty rather than experiencing severe constraints within a larger structural framework of possibilities and realities. There is no hierarchy of participation in Open Access, but there is a limited amount of ways to contribute. So what is needed is a broader set of entry points than what we have. I don’t want to fall into my old ways of exhortation, but I do want to point out how little the term actually accomplishes.
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