Open Access

Reading John Willinsky’s The Access Principle really made me think about the ease of access to scholarly journals that I have basically taken for granted over the past six years of undergraduate and graduate school. Essentially, if I’ve been working on a research paper and wanted access to a journal article (or even some newspaper articles), there was about a 90% chance that I could instantly access it online through my school’s library system. As the Old Scholar has pointed out, occasionally you will find an article that your library does not have access to, but I’ve always been able to get those articles through the interlibrary loan system. The fact is, my status as a university student has allowed me to read anything that I have wanted to over the past six years. After I (hopefully) graduate in May, that is going to change. I’m no longer going to have that privilege.

Of course, Willinsky would argue that having access to journal articles shouldn’t be a privilege, it should be a right. And I agree with him. I know that there are economic realities involved, but fundamentally, why should research (particularly research done by academics at public universities) be closed off from a member of the general public who wants access to it? As Willinsky brings to light, open access is really about public access to knowledge. The prohibitive cost of higher education in this country has already limited that public access to some degree, because it discourages people who don’t think that pursuing a degree in higher education is economically viable. Journals that are not open access have contributed to the high cost of education. Indeed, the exorbitant prices that university libraries currently have to pay for access to certain journals and databases is mind-blowing. I do realize that even if every journal became open access, everything would not immediately become free. There would still be a lot of costs involved, and assuredly the majority of those costs would still be paid by university libraries. However, open access would allow anyone from anywhere (i.e. non-university students) to read what they want to read.

Therefore, I agree with Willinsky’s argument that open access is a human rights issue- everyone deserves access to knowledge. So much of education is already closed off to the privileged few, journal articles do not have to be.