Notes on The Access Principle

More of "Alyssa reads a thing, and then sie posts the notes sie took."

This time the book is The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship.

Citation is:
Willinsky, John. The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006.

 

And off we go!

Willinsksy’s access principle is that “a commitment to the value and quality of research carries with it a responsibility to extend the circulation of this work as far as possible, and ideally to all who are interested in it and all who might profit by it.” (5)

Doing good for a discipline and for other researchers by increasing the accessibility of work and doing well for one’s self by increasing impact both push academics towards open access.

Open Access “opens a new world of learning to those outside the academic realm, to dedicated professionals and interested amateurs, to concerned journalists and policymakers.” (33.)

“The exclusion of women and members of certain racial minorities from scientific education and the scientific professions constitutes not only a social injustice but a cognitive failing. Similarly, the automatic devaluation in Europe and North America of science from elsewhere constitutes a cognitive failing.” (Longino 132.)

That is, even for academics who are not concerned with the justice aspect should concern themselves with exclusion of certain groups from sciences (and other disciplines as well) because it is a failing in how knowledge is created and it reduces the quality of research overall.
Longino, Helen. 2002. The fate of Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 132. Qtd in Willinsky 34.

Many academics support a push towards open access scholarship, allowing more people to read (and often, cite) their work. Citation counts and other measures of impact often increase when a journal becomes open access.

There are reports that when a journal moves to an open access model, either delayed or immediate, it may receive a significant increase in submissions- cite ALSO
Lossius and Søreide: Open access publishing: a girder in the success of the Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine. Scandinavian Journal of Trauma, Resuscitation and Emergency Medicine 2011 19:7.

NOT directly from book, but thought of while reading: If editors and organizers value the increase in submissions that open access may bring, open access to calls for submissions is also important. Using the definition from the Budapest Open Access Initiative the only barriers to open access work are those “inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself,” which cognitive access barriers in the calls for submissions are not.

(citation: "Read the Budapest Open Access Initiative." Budapest Open Access Initiative. 2002. Web. <http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read>. )

Find Haefeli, William. 2004. Cartoon. New Yorker, July 12, p 83. “Please don't be offended if I consult other sources of information.”

Public access to scholarly work typically adds little or nothing to the online publication costs, but it does increase readership, impact, and name recognition for the journal. (Writing so that everyone can understand calls for submission may be a bit more resource-intensive.)

At any rate, waiting for the [digital] divide to be closed somehow is a poor excuse for the academic community's not doing what it can now do about the inequitable distribution of access to research and scholarship. [Both reading and creating!!!] Critiques of the digital divide in hardware and software lose some of their sting if the authors are doing nothing to ensure that their own contributions are being made freely availale online and not part of an information divide. (112.)

With increasing public access to scholarship, public engagement increases. Ordinary citizens become involved in the process of research, not just reading the results, with the public helping to track the spread of disease and (cite and link Big Think article) analyzing tumor samples.

On the topic of the environment, Fischer writes, “Instead of questioning the citizen's ability to participate, we must ask how we can interconnect and coordinate the different but inherently interdependent discourses of citizens and experts” (45.) If this is true generally for people, the environments we live in, and how best to fix problems within our lives, then it only makes sense that it is still true specifically for disabled people, the environments we live in, and how best to fix the problems within our lives. Rewriting to this specific context, we get. “Instead of questioning the disabled person's ability to participate, we must ask how we can interconnect and coordinate the different but inherently interdependent discourses of disabled people and experts.” In both cases, the supposed experts have much to learn from the people whose problems they claim to be expert in.
Fischer, Frank. Citizens, Experts, and the Environment: The Politics of Local Knowledge. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000.

“Enabling people to play a greater part in the research that directly affects their own lives can lead to better science.” (120.)

In astronomy, collaboration between amateurs and professionals has already produced valuable results and valuable observational data which professionals then further analyzed. Non-professionals have also contributed significantly to work in linguistics, lexicography, and botany.

“It may well be that the very independence of scholarship, which adds greatly to its value in the struggle for human rights, has rested for too long on its relative inaccessibility. But academic freedom needs to be based on more than the fact that so few have access to what is being done in freedom's name” (153.)

In arguing that public rights to know and rights to philosophy support the case for open access, Willinsky specifically does not ask scholars to write for the potentially much wider audience they could acquire.[cite here] Under certain circumstances, however, I do. The main take away points of articles directly impacting on people's lives should be summarized such that readers can understand those impacts. Calls for contributions on topics that are about people's lives or directly impact peoples lives should be written so that people can understand what's being asked for and respond.

Want to find:

• Directory of Open Access Journals
• The Effects of Open Access and Downloads (‘Hits’) on Citation Impact: A Bibliography of Studies
• The Core Metalist of Open Access Eprint Archives: opcit.eprints.org/explorearchives.html
• African Journals Online program
• Open Journal Systems