Abstract
Education is an exercise of sharing. Sharing is the singular means by which education is achieved. If scholars are not freely sharing what they know with others, there is no education; no advancement of knowledge. The public and democratic purposes of higher education and its potential have been co-opted by symbolic and economic forces that have eroded the focus of the scholarly community's impact on academic publishing. The struggle over academic publishing needs to be understood in terms of higher education's broader purposes and the trend toward corporatization. Open educational resources allow for the restoration of a focus on the community by challenging the increasing privatization and corporatization of knowledge.