The Access Principle

I’ve just returned from a seminar titled “Spreading the Word” that was organized by the Alternative Lawyer’s Forum and the Independent Publishers Distribution Alternative. Prime among their concerns has been the matter of equitable access, distribution, copyright, copyleft, digital and other rights, and so on.

Which reminded me of a book that I reviewed recently in Current Science, the Bangalore based journal titled The Access Principle. The case for Open Access to research and scholarship by John Willinsky (The MIT Press, paperback, xv + 287 pp, ISBN: 9780262512664. US$16.95). Here is the review:

John Willinsky is the Khosla Family Professor of Education at Stanford University. A votary of the Open Access movement, his book, The Access Principle published in 2006 has won a number of awards for its scholarship.

At its heart is a simple idea, that “a commitment to scholarly work carries with it the responsibility to circulate that work as widely as possible”. This is in part so that knowledge that is created can be disseminated in a manner that the largest numbers of people have unfettered access to it, but there is more to it than just that…

The issues that Willinsky deals with have wider ramifications. For instance, who “owns” knowledge? The scholar who creates it through research, or the funding agency that funded it directly or indirectly, or the commercial publishing house who owns the journal where the research was reported? And how best can it be used for public good, while ensuring that all involved parties do not go unrewarded or unrecognised?

The book is very timely: the digital revolution is upon us all in a way that demands that such issues be thought about afresh since the modes of preservation of information and the modes of dissemination of knowledge have changed radically in our lifetime. For one thing, most journals of any quality are now online. Furthermore, many of them are “open access”, namely the articles they carry can be viewed without a subscription. However, the majority of academic journals have been in existence prior for a long time now and date back to the pre-digital era. The digitization of this legacy is a related issue, and the manner of the digitization and its consequent costs is relevant.

A case in point is the present journal. Current Science has been published since 1934, and today it is online and open access. However, chances are that you will read this review in print rather than online, since the manner in which Current Science is presented online is by offering pdf images of each page (or each article) in the journal. Earlier issues of the journal have now been scanned and can also be viewed, but typically they cannot be searched.

Other models of the digitization of scholarly content range from the Public Library of Science, PLoS, or Bio Med Central, BMC, families of journals that are purely online and open access, the costs being entirely borne by the authors of each of the articles that have been accepted by the journal(s). These costs are, in turn, borne by the agencies that fund the research, and in this sense, it is only fair that publicly funded research should be openly and freely available.

But issues are more complex in an era of impact factors and journal citations. The most prestigious journals, at least in terms of their perceived rankings, like Nature and Science are neither open access nor are they purely digital. It will be a long time before their influence will wane, so it is important to understand the totality of the access problem.
Today it is a commonplace that the majority of scholars in any part of the world access academic information primarily in an electronic manner, and not through the pages of a printed journal. This revolution is similar to that wrought by Gutenberg, who through the printed page freed humankind from the purely oral tradition by offering mass producible books that anyone (with enough money!) could obtain, keep, learn from, and use to advantage.

And it is the complex nature of this revolution that The Access Princple addresses through its extensive research. The thirteen chapters of the book examine issues ranging from the history to what is copyright, the politics and the economics. Willinsky, like most of us, believes that openness is “better” in an abstract way- at the end of the day its not clear from which quarter the fundamental advances are going to come, and so its best to not deny anyone the requisite opportunities. The more people who have access to knowledge, the more one can maximize the probability of any one of them using some part of it in a fundamental and future altering manner.

The first journals appeared only in the 1600′s. The Philosphical Transactions of the Royal Society grew out of the publication of the correspondence between the members of the society thanks to the efforts and foresight of Oldenburg. Despite the reputation for secrecy that surrounds his name, one of the earliest articles was a letter from Newton on The Theory of Light and colours. Newton appears to have held the opinion that public exposition of his research was both a duty and a privilege, and in that sense, scientific journals offered an intermediate space between the public book and the private letter.

But journals offer more than just exposure. The process of peer review, the validation, and with time, the prestige of publication and the vanity have all contributed to making the dissemination of science a fairly substantial business. And in the details of how this business is run lie some of the more contentious problems of the open access paradigm. Willinsky is quick to emphasise that open is not free- someone, somewhere has to invest in providing access. He lists ten flavours of open access to underscore this point. For instance, scholars can post articles on their homepages, submit them to eprint archives, or pay a journal to allow open access to their articles. Journals, on the other hand, can subsidise access (as many Indian journals, notably those of the Indian Academy of Sciences, do), use their print versions to subsidise the online versions, allow delayed or partial open access, have a subsidy model in place, and so on. A cooperative movement such as JSTOR has played a very important role in developing tools to digitise old journals in a manner so as to make their content digitally searchable, and the access they allow is not free, but by having a flexible policy as regards revenue, they enable access in a significant manner.

The different chapters of the book are devoted to a variety of issues such as copyright and its consequences, the role of scholarly bodies and their publishing models and imperatives, the economics of open access, the role that this can play in development, and so on. The digital revolution holds within itself considerable promise. Universities, colleges, and schools that did not build up physical libraries can, given enough resources, build up essentially a complete repository of the knowledge generated by humankind since whenever. Anecdotal evidence on this count is abundant and genuine, particularly in countries like India where the public investment in libraries is very limited.

As a scholar who has devoted the better part of two decades to such matters, Willinsky argues the case for increased openness in scholarly publications with vigour and with wisdom, and without oversimplifying the issues at hand. The commitment to the cause is most evident in his chapter on Rights, where he proposes that access to knowledge is a fundamental human right, one that is closely related to the ability to defend other rights. The argument is tenuous but offers an interesting perspective on the ability of increased access to knowledge to have an impact beyond the areas envisioned by the creators of that knowledge. To some extent, the Right to Information Act in India has had a very similar effect- information on one aspect of public life can have consequences on other aspects.

In the end, the most compelling aspect of this book is the simplicity of the basic argument. Scholars should see that their work reaches the largest number of people and should make all efforts to ensure this. This is their dharma. Academic administrators should see that scholarly work is supported in a manner so as to have this wide reach. And this is their karma. In the long run, inclusivity is clearly more in the public interest than exclusion in any form, especially in a globalized world, and the Open Access movement can help us along this path.