2005 TheAccessPrinciple

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Subject Headings: Open Access Journal, The Public Knowledge Project.

Notes

Cited by

Quotes

Book Overview

  • Questions about access to scholarship go back farther than recent debates over subscription prices, rights, and electronic archives suggest. The great libraries of the past — from the fabled collection at Alexandria to the early public libraries of nineteenth-century America — stood as arguments for increasing access. In The Access Principle, John Willinsky describes the latest chapter in this ongoing story — online open access publishing by scholarly journals — and makes a case for open access as a public good.
  • A commitment to scholarly work, writes Willinsky, carries with it a responsibility to circulate that work as widely as possible: this is the access principle. In the digital age, that responsibility includes exploring new publishing technologies and economic models to improve access to scholarly work. Wide circulation adds value to published work; it is a significant aspect of its claim to be knowledge. The right to know and the right to be known are inextricably mixed. Open access, argues Willinsky, can benefit both a researcher-author working at the best-equipped lab at a leading research university and a teacher struggling to find resources in an impoverished high school.
  • Willinsky describes different types of access — the New England Journal of Medicine, for example, grants open access to issues six months after initial publication, and First Monday forgoes a print edition and makes its contents immediately accessible at no cost. He discusses the contradictions of copyright law, the reading of research, and the economic viability of open access. He also considers broader themes of public access to knowledge, human rights issues, lessons from publishing history, and "epistemological vanities." The debate over open access, writes Willinsky, raises crucial questions about the place of scholarly work in a larger world — and about the future of knowledge.

Preface

  • To reiterate, this move to open access does not mean that the work is free. The reader still has to find her way through considerable machinery to the Internet. It does not mean that the author goes unpaid. This act of making a research article public is precisely what the author is paid for, in part, as a scholar employed by a university or research institute. Yet open access does pose a bit of a challenge to those who publish the work. As this book describes in some detail, the methods and models of open access publishing are already numerous. The number of open access journals is now approaching 4,000 titles. The majority of these have found that online publication has enabled them to sufficiently reduce their costs to drop subscriptions and rely on institutional subsidies and the mainstay of all journals, whatever their model, namely, volunteered content, reviewing, and editing.

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

E Indexing of the Serial Literature 233

F Metadata for Journal Publishing 241

References


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 AuthorvolumeDate ValuetitletypejournaltitleUrldoinoteyear
2005 TheAccessPrincipleJohn WillinskyThe Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarshiphttp://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10611