LIS 701 Kimberly A. Reed.

Context Book John Wilensky, The Access Principle, The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.
Sharing scientific and scholarly publications is necessary for the growth of knowledge, for education and for the creative fusions that sustain shared projects. Willinsky offers a wide range of formats and practices for sustaining open access to research and scholarship while endeavoring to respect peer review and authorship. The writers and producers of scholarly and scientific articles do not get paid for their writing, editing or peer reviewing activities that result in publication in prestigious but very expensively priced journals. The owners of the copyright, corporations like Reed Elsivier accrue the value from these activities, pocketing the profit of journal subscription and article copy sales without redistributing that value for the public good. This violates the ethic of science, an ethic based on sharing data, research and ideas with the greater community. The history of publication and the history of libraries are a progression based on increasing access to the word and the work in print. The access principle is the responsibility to share your work as widely as possible for the common good. In the age of the Internet, our methods, modalities and economic models have changed to support greater access. Open access does not devalue the reputation or importance of a publication. For example the New England Journal of Medicine gives open access six months after initial publication, yet loses no part of their reputation or importance. Influential publications that are online have increasing importance. The real vanity is locking up research and ideas in exclusive and expensive publications controlled by commercial companies that pay the authors and their communities little or nothing. Willinsky articulates a new ethics of research publication that is based on open access. Point by point Willinsky takes down the academic system of publishing that connects prestige to controlled access to publications by subscription. He argues that open access increases the number of times authors are cited, increases the use of findings and data, increases the circulation of publications and the likelihood that users will return to those sources. Open access publication leads to an increase in reputation rather than a decrease. The current journal system is the real vanity press because it ties prestige to limited audiences. Open access is also peer reviewed. Open access is moral and sustains higher quality research publication, often paid for by public and institutional support that should also accrue to the common good. Willinsky writes very clearly. He uses existing models to promote a movement to open access and electronic sources that is fully underway. I agree with Willinskys moral reasoning about open access as a responsibility which extends the ethic that science should be shared. Scientists have a responsibility to share their findings and contribute to the frontiers of knowledge. Willinsky argues that most research is supported by public or institutional resources that we all pay for in part and that we should accrue all value from. There are two problems with this argument. (1) Production by salaried employees may privilege university and non-profit institutions that emphasize primary research. These institutions have cultural production agendas that may be less interested in the frontiers of creative art, new literature, and outrageous ideas. The realm of the commercial publisher is not as limited by the politics of bureaucracy or the moral nightmares of academic debate. (2) Despite his moral high ground, Willinsky is nave about how work is produced properly and how this is paid for. Journal editors

and staff members are employed to do tedious administrative and editorial work. Universities do not employ all of them; their journal publishers do. His hope that cooperatives between universities and professional associations will sustain open access journals is admirable. This is happening in a small number of places. Someone still needs to pay the staff. Or, labor can be unpaid. Do not pay the intern, graduate student or junior faculty member doing tedious administrative and editorial work like line editing, formatting, style and fact checking, soliciting, tracking and scheduling manuscripts, managing the budget or other editorial and production labor. They are in it for the glory, ay? Yet the glory accrues to the institution and only to the tenured faculty. In many public colleges and institutions the number of tenured faculty is limited, even in decline. The academy is under no pressure to increase the number of permanent tenured faculty or staff. Adjuncts and interns rush to find ways to eat for a few dollars, or compete to distinguish their CV from the mass pile. Is Willinsky pro-slavery in the already exploited lower end of the academy? The journal staff deserves to be paid living wages. They already work under super-exploitation for half the salaries of the academic writers and the business managers who employ them. The assumption that everyone who produces gets tenure or a full time permanent job is simply not true. Sources of first hand reporting about contemporary issues do not appear in university studies until a decade after they first appear in the press. Internet website articles are rarely as detailed or critical as full length feature reporting from a seasoned investigative reporter, who needs to eat and deserves to get paid. Yes, the labor necessary to produce culture is valuable. Value is not automatically redistributed to the underpaid or unpaid denizens who produce it in its origins. Open access cooperatives work best with scholarly and scientific research that originates in institutions that pay administrators first, then tenured faculty, and the rest as little as possible. Willinsky slips out of his philosophers logic when he addresses the Bush administrations policies on education. I did not like the Bush administration, but the authors tone sounds personal, almost unprofessional. I am afraid that open access and Internet based publications will have less editorial control. Will open become more personal, perhaps to the point of violating the rules of argument? We still need standards for format, style, grammar, argument and validity based on repeated testing of ideas and research data. The New England Journal of Medicine embodies good standards for all of these points, but there are countless open source sites on the net that may not. We still need to establish authority for publications. I do not want that authority to be trapped entirely in either academic or commercial formats. They balance one another. In What is a document? (JASIS 1997), Michael Buckland recalled the phenomenological position: The object is perceived to be a document. Willinsky challenges the phenomenological stasis of academic publishing, where the article is not really considered a valuable publication unless it is published in an exclusive, expensive journal with a print medium. Willinsky successfully argues that the article is really a valuable article if people in open access common space find it to be useful or interesting, because they refer to the article and refer others to its publication site. The locus of perceived value and prestige has to shift from the vanity of high end, expensive and exclusive sources to the success of research and ideas in the greater intellectual commons supported by the Internet. This is a phenomenological shift with consequences for semantic definitions of standards, management and bibliographic control. Will the new source of value be utility, how often an article is accessed or used? Will this favor easy reading? Is the market or the mass public the best judge of value in specialized research?

The Open Access debate is directly relevant to my interests. The publishing cooperatives between library associations and scholarly associations are developing. For example the American Institute of Physics site offers a link to the scholarly articles in the physics and science index, as well as information for librarians who seek to use the site and its resources. I read articles for an open access journal for several years, Scientific Journals International. Some submissions were so poor I rejected them, but most were returned for revision or published almost on the spot. The turnaround for publication is much faster than the old process of sending print media out to the reviewer. If I wrote a review in February for a print journal, it might not appear until September or December following year. The open access peer review takes a couple of weeks. Will open access journals nonetheless reproduce the privilege of academic sponsorship, or be more open to independent scholars, journalists and non-fiction writers? Will the guides and censors of University research be the guides and censors of the virtual world as well? The times, they are a changing. And upon us.