I do see your point, but the Oxford University Press is not Adobe, Time-Warner, or the gym; it is considered a charitable institution, and is exempt from corporation taxes in the UK and the US. Depending on how you count, the Press’s mission, to print scholarly books for scholars as the publishing arm of the University, arguably goes back to 1478, or circa 1580, but it really and truly fully became a part of the University in the 1630s under Laud. I read Harry Carter’s fascinating history of the Press years ago, and remember being especially taken by the fact that it kept books in print (though not necessarily in new editions) from the seventeenth into the twentieth centuries. It was possible to purchase a brand new copy of certain works that had never exhausted, printed in the seventeenth century, well into the twentieth century. In other words, the OUP is very much a special case.
When the OUP’s fees for access to the standard and definitive English lexicographic work start to become onerous on institutions of learning (and that for me is the crux of Cory’s article), then something is fundamentally out of whack, because it was created to serve scholarship. The size of readership for a given work has never been an issue historically; it prints works on scholarly merit, by and large. It also prints well-prepared “pot-boilers,” works which do appeal to a broader audience, and I wonder if this has gradually created an environment at the press in which the profit motive is writ larger.
