Chapter 10: Rights
Willinsky describes open access as “public access” (111). He offers a reasonable amount of text in relaying how public access is not only a public good, but also a human right. Though he admits his argument regarding human rights is a stretch, he utilizes the philosophies of Jacques Derrida and Immanuel Kant to push his argument by showing how the right to know is about equitable access. He uses Derrida’s argument for a person’s fundamental right to philosophy (Who’s Afraid of Philosophy: Right to Philosophy, 2002) to argue that the “[academic] community needs to assist less fortunate colleagues in participating in the critical freedom that is so vital to the humanities” (147), and Kant’s discussion of the Enlightenment (“An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” in Kant: Political Writings, 1970) to push the public, scholars, and journals to find “ways of increasing people’s access to intellectual resources that would support public reasoning and freedom” (149).
By incorporating Derrida and Kant into the conversation, Willinsky not only provides a theoretical perspective on the issue of open access, but also invites the humanities to engage in a discussion that up to this point focuses on the sciences.
To further broaden his argument of open access as a movement toward the public good, Willinsky contextualizes his argument in history by again pushing the definition of open access as a human right and also as social action. He reiterates how technology, throughout history, advocates open access by enabling the public to produce texts (like the printing press). Authors no longer have to depend solely on editors or journals to decide the fate of their scholarship; instead, an author has agency to produce texts and to grant access to the public.