This article by Dr. Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society, centers around John Willinsky’s ‘The Access Principle’, which argues that the knowledge conveyed in Scientific publications amounts to being a public good, and hence access to it should be open to the extent possible. Willinsky assigns the apparent need for open access to the increasing cost of institutional subscriptions.
However, the author of this article argues that the expansive notion of open access, as used by Willinsky, is more focused on a general spirit and direction than on the precise shape of the end result. This fosters an “us-versus-them” fundamentalism that could undermine the efforts of publishers to make content available according to their individual business and publishing models, the author contends.
Category: Articles
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