Willinsky: The Access Principle

I was surprised to learn how far the Open Access movement has come - I'd assumed that it was a good idea, but one that hadn't picked up much momentum. I thought such a thing would be very hard to pull off in our profit-motivated society. Even though there's some incentive for the authors ("the right to be known"), on a whole I'd chalk one up for idealism.

It was amusing to read one publisher's dire warning that giving people access to all this information would lead to chaos - that patients might even come to their doctors "asking things". Patients have been increasingly pestering their doctors since the dawn of the Internet, and the best doctors turn that to their advantage. I imagine most would be delighted if their patients pestered them with academic journal citations rather than the normal junk that's to be found on the Web.

I'm skeptical about whether author's Cooperative model would work. If members do all the work, and non-members get free access, it would take an act of idealism (or institutional guilt) to remain a member. But I've already been proven wrong once about idealism, so I'm willing to accept that it's possible.