The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and

308 Pages·2005·1.12 MB·English

by  John Willinsky

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 Roleof Academic Libraries inTeaching,
Learning, and Research, edited by Lawrence Dowler, 1997
Civic Space/Cyberspace: The American PublicLibrary inthe
Information Age,Redmond Kathleen Molz and Phyllis Dain, 1999
Digital Libraries,William Y. Arms, 1999
From Gutenberg to theGlobal Information Infrastructure:Accessto
Information in the Networked World,Christine L.Borgman, 2000
The IntellectualFoundation of Information, Elaine Svenonius, 2000
Digital Library Use: Social Practice in Design and Evaluation,edited by
Ann Peterson Bishop,NancyA. Van House, and BarbaraP. Buttenfield,
2003
TREC:Experiment and Evaluation in Information Retrieval, edited by
Ellen M.Voorhees and Donna K. Harman,2005
The AccessPrinciple: The Case for Open Access toResearch and
Scholarship,JohnWillinsky, 2005
The Access Principle
The Case for Open Access to Research and
Scholarship
John Willinsky
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London,England
(2006MassachusettsInstituteofTechnology
Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbookmaybereproducedinanyformbyany
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ThisbookwassetinSabonon3B2byAscoTypesetters,HongKong,and
printedandboundintheUnitedStatesofAmerica.
LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Willinsky,John,1950–
Theaccessprinciple:thecaseforopenaccesstoresearchandscholarship/John
Willinsky.
p. cm.—(Digitallibrariesandelectronicpublishing)
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
ISBN0-262-23242-1(hc:alk.paper)
1.Openaccesspublishing. 2.Scholarlyelectronicpublishing. 3.Science
publishing. 4.Librariesandelectronicpublishing. 5.Communicationinlearning
andscholarship. 6.Communicationinscience. I.Title. II.Series.
Z286.O63W55 2006
070.50797—dc22 2005047471
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ToJMH 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 ScholarlyAssociation Budgets 217
C Journal Management Economies 221
D AnOpen AccessCooperative 227
viii Contents
E Indexingof the SerialLiterature 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,publichealth,andotherareaswithaninordinatelysmallsample
of the relevant literature? Funding for these projects, which came from
collaborationswithdevelopednations(rangingfromtheWellcomeTrust
intheUnitedKingdomtotheWalterReedArmyInstituteofResearchin
the United States) went into salaries, support for students, and keeping
the institute running. And although the institute’s faculty found ways to
gettheirhandsonaspecificarticle, whetherbyrequestingacopyfroma
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
InterNetworkAccesstoResearchInitiative),hadgrownsincethentoen-
compassover2,000journalsinthehealthfield,andithadnotbeenlong
before the initiative had registered over 1,000 institutions from 101 of
the world’s less fortunate countries.
WhenIvisitedinJune2003,theKEMRIlibraryhadbutonecomputer
foritspatronstousewiththeInternet,andtherewasasignupsheetona
clipboardforfacultyandstudentstoplacetheirnamesontosecuresome
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, whichwere still sittinginboxes,inan effort tohelp 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
ofopenaccesstomedicalliterature,anditgreatlystrengthenedKEMRI’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.
Underverydifferentcircumstances,theleadpieceintheNewYorker’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,withthescoresservingastheentiremeasureofaschool’ssuccess
or failure (Gladwell 2003, 34). In driving this critique home, the item’s
author,staffwriterMalcolmGladwell,reached outtoastudybyRobert
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