Open Access News

I know John Willinsky to be an energetic and engaging speaker, so I couldn’t resist dipping into his new book, The Access Principle, for what I hoped would be a good read. I was not disappointed. Willinsky takes up the complex issue of open access publishing and does a terrific job of explaining why this issue is becoming increasingly important for academics in any discipline. It is unfortunate that many academics feel that assuring access to research is not central to their work. They are engaged in attracting funding, completing research and publishing the results. Finding their publications to build further research proposals is the problem of subsequent researchers. Most researchers want to publish their findings in the highest prestige journal possible essentially, as Willinsky shows, making a leap of faith that their contributions will reach a large audience and make a favorable impression on those holding the purse stings at institutions and grant making organizations....One thing that delays progress is the complexity of the issue....One of the ways Willinsky brings clarity to the situation is by consistently insisting that academic researchers are in the business of growing the world’s knowledge base....Willinsky makes a strong case for the contention that the aggressively competitive role commercial publishers play in academic publishing has had a negative impact on access for everyone, not just smaller schools and poorer countries....

The almost unbelievably high figures on readership for open access journals attest to the demand for scholarly information, presumably stifled only by accessibility. Willinsky openly admits the utopian quality of the open access movement, but also points out that the current publishing model is unsustainable, both in this print to electronic transition period, and in the wholly electronic period that is surely right around the corner. He makes solid points about alternative models readily available, as for example the fact that book publishers have rarely demanded that authors sign over their copyright. He also ventures into a utopian future by discussing cooperative opportunities for institutions and professional organizations to spend the money they currently spend individually for library subscriptions or journal production in ways that guarantee access to all while maintaining financial viability for scholarly publications.

Perhaps the strongest point this book makes is that openly accessible scholarly information is more valuable that information published in journals with limited access. If citation counts and numbers of readers are indicators of the value of an item, then open access materials freely available on the web are the most valuable information we have. This is not the conventional wisdom of the day, which holds that peer reviewed materials in high prestige journals is our most valuable information.