Open Access News

The Access Principle is a brilliant book, meticulously researched, and richly documented. The timing could not be better, for online journal publishing continues to expand. The mail for January 24, 2006, brought the announcement of the creation of still another open access "online" journal of education scholarship. Counting this most recent addition, the list of peer-reviewed, open access scholarly journals in education numbers 93, representing over a dozen nations (see the list of links maintained by the AERA SIG on Communication of Research). Willinsky himself has supported this expansion with the Public Knowledge Project at the University of British Columbia, whose “proof of concept” Open Journal Systems is a working support structure that dozens of online journals use in some capacity.  A revolution is underway, and Willinsky is just the person to analyze it....

The access principle as Willinsky puts it is that "[a] commitment to the value and quality of research carries with it a responsibility to extend the circulation of such work as far as possible and ideally to all who are interested in it and all who might profit from it" (p. xii). Pushed to its limits, the access principle encounters the sticky cases of proprietary research, as in the pharmaceutical or weapons industries, where the desire to attain widest possible dissemination clearly must be qualified. But restricted to the narrower domain of social science and education scholarship, the principle embodies an aspiration to be fostered and a goal to be vigorously pursued. Indeed, Willinsky goes so far as to suggest that "the excessive increase in journal prices over the last two decades is a human-rights issue" (p. 143). Drawing on the work of political scientist Richard Pierre Claude and philosopher Jacques Derrida, Willinsky concludes that "[t]he right to know that is inherent in the access principle has a claim on our humanity that stands with other basic rights, whether to life, liberty, justice, or respect" (p. 143).

Willinsky is at his most forceful when writing of the responsibility of universities to provide access to knowledge: "Universities may now be at risk, as Derrida warns, of ’becoming a branch office of conglomerates and corporations’. . . . Yet the knowledge that the universities produce already stands, in too many cases, as corporate assets for Blackwell, Springer, and Elsevier. . . If the rightly celebrated independence of the university has a higher purpose, it surely includes creating knowledge that will stand as a beacon for the right to know, as well as for knowledge that is useful in the struggle for human rights. The open access movement has done no more than demonstrate how the right to know can be more fully realized by more people, if scholars and researchers seize hold of current opportunities" (pp. 153-154)....The modern entrepreneurial university shows its true colors in its failure to grasp the opportunity that communications technology and open access present....University administrators, once apprised of the visibility that a free-to-read online journal can attain, are known to ask about the possibility of charging for access. And not just universities but professional and scholarly organizations themselves often put financial interests above the mission of dissemination of knowledge. This might be understandable, but it becomes mysterious when these organizations make no attempt to take advantage of the technologies that minimize costs....

Much of the rest of the review looks at specific OA journals and projects in the field of education.