Chapter 2: Access
Willinsky points out that access to the 50,000 journals published worldwide is expensive, and the move of around 20,000 of these journals to a digital format signals the direction journals are heading. Responsibility for moving scholarly journals to digital sites that lead to open access lands in “the hands of researchers, editors, librarians, scholarly associations, and publishers” (16).
Currently, due to the large quantities of journals, publishers are bundling subscriptions rather than allowing subscriptions to individual journals; Willinsky argues that this system is too costly for many institutions and recommends that individuals and institutions take direct action in changing the system.
A few of the recommendations Willinsky provides include the following:
- Libraries at major institutions should say no to the publishers and require that faculty and administrators protest the pricing currently in place. Universities such as Harvard, Cornell, MIT, and Duke cancelled subscriptions to Elsevier in 2003 in order to “encourage new models for research publication” (25).
- Authors and researchers should publish more work online, or at least take advantage of policies that allow authors to post digital versions of their work on personal web sites or open access archives provided by the journals.
- Journals should at least make articles freely available to developing countries.
- Institutions should take advantage of “open source software, automated processes available on the Internet, and technical infrastructures” (35) in order to take part in the open access movement.
Willinsky provides ten flavors of access and emphasizes that journals and authors do not have to provide completely open or closed access. Rather journals and authors can make choices about what type of open access to utilize (see appendices).