Chapter 1: Opening
In The Access Principle, Willinsky makes a case for open access to scientific and scholarly journal publications by introducing the access principle as an attempt “to move those in the academy and outside of it who have yet to be moved from those complacent and comfortable habits of scholarly publishing, habits that are preventing many, amid this shift in media, from seeing the new possibilities for furthering the access principle” (xii).
What is the access principle?
The access principle is a commitment to the value and quality of research that carries with it a responsibility to extend the circulation of such work as far as possible and ideally to all who are interested in it and all who might profit by it. (5)
In the first chapter, Willinsky provides a brief history of the role technology has played in starting a dialogue about open access. He argues that the decision by the Public Library of Science to launch PLoS Biology, an online and open access journal, began the open access dialogue. Today, there are free access journals of some sort in every field simply because the Internet provides sites for such dissemination of knowledge.
However, due to the demands placed on faculty at academic institutions, many authors rely on journals, which are deemed reputable by institutions that can afford subscription prices, in order to receive “salary increases, job offers, speaker fees, consultancies, and other opportunities” (6).
Willinsky recommends that universities take advantage of the infrastructures already in place at the institutions’ libraries to provide open access and to relieve the institutions of an “inefficient triple-sided economy” (10). With open access infrastructures in place, authors are not only rewarded for their research (and cited more frequently due to accessibility), but people in and out of institutions have free access to major scholarship in the field.