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This review has been accessed times since March 29, 2006

Willinsky, John. (2006). The access principle: The case for open access to research and scholarship. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Pp. xv + 287
ISBN 0-262-23242-1

Reviewed by Kate Corby
Michigan State University

March 29, 2006

I know John Willinsky to be an energetic and engaging speaker, so I couldn’t resist dipping into his new book, The Access Principle, for what I hoped would be a good read. I was not disappointed. Willinsky takes up the complex issue of open access publishing and does a terrific job of explaining why this issue is becoming increasingly important for academics in any discipline.

It is unfortunate that many academics feel that assuring access to research is not central to their work. They are engaged in attracting funding, completing research and publishing the results. Finding their publications to build further research proposals is the problem of subsequent researchers. Most researchers want to publish their findings in the highest prestige journal possible essentially, as Willinsky shows, making a leap of faith that their contributions will reach a large audience and make a favorable impression on those holding the purse strings at institutions and grant making organizations. Even among scholars familiar with access issues, few feel that impacting the publishing paradigm is an important or attainable personal goal. With increasing attention from publications such as this one, the extent to which the solution to information access problems is a matter of cooperative engagement is becoming more readily recognized.

One thing that delays progress is the complexity of the issue. By comparison, the demands of academic success are well understood and apparently straightforward. Few tenure track authors risk publishing in an open access forum with no impact factor to report, nor, when offered publication in a prestigious journal would many risk their good fortune by insisting on liberal access to their work or retaining their copyright. Fortunately this book is not a call for individual heroics. Instead Willinsky details parameters of the problem and how solutions are beginning to appear.

One of the ways Willinsky brings clarity to the situation is by consistently insisting that academic researchers are in the business of growing the world’s knowledge base. He sees the information product of research as a public good that can be shared freely without diminishing its value. Everyone wants to remain employed and realize opportunities to continue important work, but at heart these individual concerns are part of the common goal of advancing knowledge. Ultimately every researcher also wants to be widely read and cited, to be part of a global network of scholars whose work influences the overall direction of scholarship. When Willinsky then asks the question of whether competitive forces within the publishing world are advancing that goal, it is easier to see that they are not.

Willinsky makes a strong case for the contention that the aggressively competitive role commercial publishers play in academic publishing has had a negative impact on access for everyone, not just smaller schools and poorer countries. After World War II, when academic institutions were growing rapidly due to the influx of new students sponsored by the GI Bill, it was commercial publishers, more so than non-profit associations, who stepped forward with new journals to handle the increasing research output. When library budgets could not keep up with this increased output, publishers resorted to a number of techniques to maintain cash flow and prestige. Price increases, often in the form of differential pricing for individual and institutional subscribers, was an early tactic. Willinsky cites studies showing that in the last twenty years, the average price for a commercially produced journal has risen 300%, while non-profit publications have gone up about 50%. Profit reports from commercial publishers consistently in double digits bear out this contention that it’s all about profits. Materials published in these high cost journals may make a contribution to the knowledge base, but that is incidental to their contribution to the bottom line. Willinsky contends that this situation developed in large part because the researchers using the journals were not the ones paying for them. The disconnect between the individual reader and the institutional subscriber made it possible for researchers to ignore what the commercialization of journal publishing was doing to access to their work.

The most recent profit protection tactic is bundling, often accompanied by a publisher-specific search interface to further increase use of a single publisher’s products. (Science Direct is one prominent example. It has some other content but is largely a vehicle for promoting Elsevier products.) By bundling their journals and offering favorable pricing to subscriber institutions getting every title, publishers insure higher impact and citation counts for their own products. At the same time such practices mean commercial journals take ever-greater portions of library journal budgets while larger library budgets yield smaller journal holdings lists. Statistics show that this is indeed the case. Libraries all over the world subscribe to fewer journals today than they did in years past. Fewer journals at each institution means fewer readers and fewer citations for each article published. Willinsky does not cite them but studies show that researchers tend to use the resources readily available at their own institutions and overlook relevant prior research not readily available. (Joswick, K. E. & and Stierman, J. K., 1997; Hardesty L. & Oltmanns, G., 1989; and Sandison, A., 1975 are examples.)

The almost unbelievably high figures on readership for open access journals attest to the demand for scholarly information, presumably stifled only by accessibility. Willinsky openly admits the utopian quality of the open access movement, but also points out that the current publishing model is unsustainable, both in this print to electronic transition period, and in the wholly electronic period that is surely right around the corner. He makes solid points about alternative models readily available, as for example the fact that book publishers have rarely demanded that authors sign over their copyright. He also ventures into a utopian future by discussing cooperative opportunities for institutions and professional organizations to spend the money they currently spend individually for library subscriptions or journal production in ways that guarantee access to all while maintaining financial viability for scholarly publications.

Perhaps the strongest point this book makes is that openly accessible scholarly information is more valuable that information published in journals with limited access. If citation counts and numbers of readers are indicators of the value of an item, then open access materials freely available on the web are the most valuable information we have. This is not the conventional wisdom of the day, which holds that peer reviewed materials in high prestige journals is our most valuable information. Willinsky does a good job of showing how this model is changing. It is important to appreciate that the internet is democratizing information in ways that have already begun forcing changes in how scholarly information is utilized. Via such projects as PubMed, the average citizen now has access to medical research information, and that fact is changing the way patients interact with their physicians. Education is not far behind. The No Child Left Behind Act and Department of Education responses to it are a good example of how research based information is being valued in everyday decision-making. Willinsky makes forcefully clear that the research these decisions are based upon needs to be available to all; not just the one sided views of various think tanks with a specific agenda. It is only a matter of time before these new ways of utilizing information change the way information is valued within the academy. Already many younger faculty members are using blogs to maintain a connection with a wider research community. Entire academic disciplines – physics is a notable early example – are also changing the way new research is vetted via preprint servers and other similar online exchanges that are open to all. Several new providers are joining the citation counting arena. The days when ISI (Institute for Scientific Information – publisher of the Web of Science) citation counts are the sole standard are clearly numbered.

Finally let me make a point about the organization of this book, which brings real clarity to a complex issue. Willinsky takes on this subject element by element – sample chapter titles: Copyright, Politics, Associations. This makes the whole issue so much more understandable than the typical approach, which discusses one or several specific proposals in depth. I have left other discussions of this topic feeling I understood the issues involved but my overall view was still jumbled, largely because there are attractive aspects to each of the several proposals (Willinsky identifies ten). By not advocating one “right” solution, and by relegating the details of such proposals to an appendix, Willinsky makes it easy to see the forest, while maintaining an understanding that it is composed of individual trees. I was also quite taken with Willinsky’s decision to make the historic background of his topic the end, rather than the beginning of the book. It made me realize how often I have impatiently skimmed background information to get to the meat of an author’s argument. Here, by the time the background finally came, I was familiar with the topic and ready to hear the full story. Don’t miss this important book. It will leave its readers prepared to make thoughtful decisions about the publication of their research.

References

Hardesty L. & Oltmanns, G. (1989). How Many Psychology Journals are Enough? A Study of the Use of Psychology Journals by Undergraduates. Serials Librarian, 16, 139.

Joswick, K. E. & and Stierman, J. K. (1997). The Core List Mirage: A Comparison of the Journals Frequently Consulted by Faculty and Students. College and Research Libraries, 58, 54.

Sandison, A. (1975). Patterns of Citation Densities by Date of Publication in Physical Review. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 26, 351.

About the Reviewer

Kate Corby is education and psychology reference librarian at Michigan State University. She is also editor of the Brief Reviews Section of Education Review.

Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.

Editors: Gene V Glass, Kate Corby, Gustavo Fischman

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