The access principle: the case for open access to research and scholarship

309 Pages·2006·1.052 MB·English

by  Willinsky, John

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