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The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship Item Type Book Authors Willinsky, John Citation The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship 2006, Publisher Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press Download date 01/10/2021 16:10:41 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/106529 The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship By John Willinsky | Copyright 2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology For more information, visit http://mitpress.mit.edu/0262232421 The Access Principle Digital Libraries and Electronic Publishing William Y. Arms, series editor Gateways to Knowledge: The Role of Academic Libraries in Teaching, Learning, and Research, edited by Lawrence Dowler, 1997 Civic Space/Cyberspace: The American Public Library in the Information Age, Redmond Kathleen Molz and Phyllis Dain, 1999 Digital Libraries, William Y. Arms, 1999 From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked World, Christine L. Borgman, 2000 The Intellectual Foundation of Information, Elaine Svenonius, 2000 Digital Library Use: Social Practice in Design and Evaluation, edited by Ann Peterson Bishop, Nancy A. Van House, and Barbara P. Buttenfield, 2003 TREC: Experiment and Evaluation in Information Retrieval, edited by Ellen M. Voorhees and Donna K. Harman, 2005 The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship, John Willinsky, 2005 The Access Principle The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship John Willinsky The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England ( 2006 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or informa- tion storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail hspecial_sales@mitpress .mit.edui or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. This book was set in Sabon on 3B2 by Asco Typesetters, Hong Kong, and printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Willinsky, John, 1950– The access principle : the case for open access to research and scholarship / John Willinsky. p. cm. — (Digital libraries and electronic publishing) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-23242-1 (hc: alk. paper) 1. Open access publishing. 2. Scholarly electronic publishing. 3. Science publishing. 4. Libraries and electronic publishing. 5. Communication in learning and scholarship. 6. Communication in science. I. Title. II. Series. Z286.O63W55 2006 070.50797—dc22 2005047471 10987654321 To JMH and ARH Contents Introduction ix Acknowledgments xvii 1 Opening 1 2 Access 13 3 Copyright 39 4 Associations 55 5 Economics 69 6 Cooperative 81 7 Development 93 8 Public 111 9 Politics 127 10 Rights 143 11 Reading 155 12 Indexing 173 13 History 189 Appendixes A Ten Flavors of Open Access 211 B Scholarly Association Budgets 217 C Journal Management Economies 221 D An Open Access Cooperative 227 viii Contents E Indexing of the Serial Literature 233 F Metadata for Journal Publishing 241 References 245 Index 271 Introduction By the dawn of the twenty-first century, the tidy but modest library that looks out on the gardens at the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI) in Nairobi was able to subscribe to only five medical jour- nals. As Nancy Kamau, the institute’s librarian, explained to me, since KEMRI had opened in 1979, it had been forced to cut one journal title after another from its list of subscriptions, as prices kept jumping ahead of the budget allocation and the Kenyan currency fluctuated. The real shame of it, Kamau pointed out, was that the final five subscriptions, which they could barely afford, did not include the leading journals on the institute’s principal research interest, tropical diseases. How could KEMRI properly support its current projects in biotechnology, leprosy, malaria, public health, and other areas with an inordinately small sample of the relevant literature? Funding for these projects, which came from collaborations with developed nations (ranging from the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom to the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in the United States) went into salaries, support for students, and keeping the institute running. And although the institute’s faculty found ways to get their hands on a specific article, whether by requesting a copy from a colleague they knew in the West or by picking it up when they had an opportunity to travel abroad, the leading medical research center in East Africa was itself operating more and more in a research literature vacuum. Then in July 2001 came a turning point. As Kamau went on to ex- plain, the World Health Organization managed to convince six of the leading corporate journal publishers to provide developing nations with open access to the electronic editions of their medical journals. This x Introduction meant that the online contents of a sizable number of medical journals were suddenly available at no charge to the faculty and students at KEMRI and elsewhere. The program, known as HINARI (the Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative), had grown since then to en- compass over 2,000 journals in the health field, and it had not been long before the initiative had registered over 1,000 institutions from 101 of the world’s less fortunate countries. When I visited in June 2003, the KEMRI library had but one computer for its patrons to use with the Internet, and there was a signup sheet on a clipboard for faculty and students to place their names on to secure some time examining the wealth of literature newly available as a result of the initiative. A local university had recently sent over another six com- puters, which were still sitting in boxes, in an effort to help KEMRI take advantage of this boon to access the journals it needed. The sudden and radical turning point in the intellectual fortunes of KEMRI’s faculty and students spoke to how the Internet was being used in innovative ways to increase access to research. HINARI offered a particular model of open access to medical literature, and it greatly strengthened KEMRI’s ability to fulfill its promise as a research and training center. But the introduction of this open access approach to scholarly publishing is also having a public impact that extends well beyond the academic community. Under very different circumstances, the lead piece in the New Yorker’s ‘‘Talk of the Town’’ for September 15, 2003, took issue with the educa- tional emphasis that the U.S. government was placing on student test scores, with the scores serving as the entire measure of a school’s success or failure (Gladwell 2003, 34). In driving this critique home, the item’s author, staff writer Malcolm Gladwell, reached out to a study by Robert L. Linn (2003) that challenged the very reliability of the achievement tests the government was relying on. Linn’s study had been published two weeks earlier in Educational Policy Analysis Archives, an open ac- cess journal from Arizona State University. The journal had not issued a press release for Linn’s study, as medical journals do on occasion with breakthrough discoveries, nor had a research summary been issued. Gladwell found the study with Google, in all likelihood, and was able Introduction xi to read it with a subscription because Linn’s work was published in an open access journal. Public access to research has become all the more important in recent years with the increased emphasis on political accountability and the corresponding call for ‘‘evidence-based policymaking’’ in government. Nowhere is that more apparent than with the recent U.S. Education Act, otherwise known as the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. The act states, for example, that government funding will be provided to ‘‘imple- ment promising educational reform programs and school improvement programs based on scientifically based research.’’ The chances of ‘‘state educational agencies and local educational agencies,’’ as they are identi- fied in the act, finding such research hinges on these bodies’ having open access to scholarly literature, much as such access helped Gladwell make his case against the act. Such are the public and democratic prospects of open access publishing models. Now, a few years earlier, Gladwell (2000) had published a book on what he called the ‘‘tipping point,’’ which describes how an idea or product can go from relative obscurity to that moment of recognition when ‘‘little things can make a big difference,’’ tipping the idea into gen- eral acceptance. The Kenya Medical Research Institute’s sudden ability to access the literature it needs to carry out its important work in health or the New Yorker’s citing a freely available research study is unlikely to prove the tipping point for the open access approach to scholarly pub- lishing. However, as I go on in this book to describe, the occurrence of a significant number of such moments and instances suggests that the tip is on, if by no means over. What is clear at this point is that open ac- cess to research archives and journals has the potential to change the public presence of science and scholarship and increase the circulation of this particular form of knowledge. What is also clear is that the role that open access will play in the future of scholarly publishing depends on decisions that will be made over the new few years by researchers, editors, scholarly societies, publishers, and research-funding agencies. This is a book that lays out the case for open access and why it should be a part of that future.

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