The Access Principle: the Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship by John Willinsky (original) (raw)

2006, SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY

References 245 Index 271 viii Contents 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 encompass 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 computers, 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 educational 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 access 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 product of a highly talented team of undergraduates and graduate students who have come together in the Public Knowledge Project at the University of British Columbia. The principal piece of software, known as Open Journal Systems, has contributed much to my understanding of online journal processes, economics, indexing, and reading, and figures as such in this book. Additionally, this effort to build robust software that improves the quality of access to journals proved an excellent focal point for discussing the possibilities of open access publishing with researchers, editors, librarians, and publishers in many parts of the world. Open Journal Systems has turned out to be more than a talking point and a test bed for the ideas discussed in this book. It has moved beyond the proof-of-concept stage, with the assistance and encouragement of an international open source community, and is now being used to publish open access journals, as well as some subscription journals around the world, with versions now available in seven languages. Given the interest shown in this open source software, a partnership was formed in early 2005 among the Public Knowledge Project, the Canadian Center for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University, and Simon Fraser University Library to oversee the long-term development of Open Journal Systems, Open Conference Systems, and the PKP Harvester. This book, however, is not about the development of publishing software; it is about the age-old question of access to knowledge. In considering what open access has to offer on that question in this book, this is a work of inquiry and advocacy. Its goal is to inform and inspire a larger debate over the political and moral economy of knowledge that will constitute the future of research. It seeks to elevate the questions currently being raised about how research is published, so that they are seen to shine a greater light on our work as scholars and as citizens of a larger world. And at this historic moment, in this transition in journal publishing from print to digital formats, the model of open access publishing challenges not only traditional methods of publishing scholarly work, but the very presence and place of this knowledge in the world. What, then, of the all-too-obvious irony of publishing a book in print and on sale in bookstores about making online research free for the world? I have published and circulated earlier versions of most of these xiv Introduction Introduction xv I wish to thank to Janice Kreider, Pia Christensen, and Anne White, who provided helpful assistance and thoughtful comments that furthered the work that has gone into this book. Many lessons about online publishing were learned from the Public Knowledge Project software team that worked on Open Journal Systems, led by Kevin Jamieson and including