Quotes from this article:
Pursuing alternative means for access to learning spaces becomes fundamental when we understand copyright as a form of capitalist gatekeeping, one that – along with frequently increased tuition fees, skyrocketing rental prices, and, demands for certified linguistic skills – contributes to entrenching elitist class divides based almost purely on one’s capacity to pay. For anarchists and all those engaged in intersectional and class struggle, it’s no longer the old ad hominem of ‘educate to liberate’, but, in many cases, we’re waging a war to gain access to the very knowledge, methods, and tactics others spent decades researching. We must ‘liberate to educate’. So how, exactly, might we go about it?
This also reminds me of the arguments I've seen between using contemporary YA and classic literature in classes. People have put forth the desire that publishing houses selling YA are promoting the use of it to "make money" (which is probably true, as we can see that organisations like We Need Diverse Books are partnering with Scholastic) and that classics are "available for free or are very cheap to procure."
Which is sort of but not quite true. Schools will still purchase new copies of classics (which are still the same price as other contemporary YA). I think that there are publishers with ulterior motives who do use these spaces.
It's much the same way that JSTOR and the like will try to market themselves to universities (and even high schools), as it's "cheaper" than getting each article.
At the time of writing, Swartz’s Manifesto is offered in twenty-six languages demonstrating the reach work can have when texts are not confined into anglicised and privately controlled forms.
Inevitably, any concessions made from their 40% profit margins will be conveyed as a wonderful effort on the part of these publishers to make research ‘accessible’; in precisely the same way that banks are currently portraying themselves as providing the solution to homeless folk having been unable to open bank accounts without a fixed address without acknowledging that they imposed this condition in the first place.