Willinsky and Stipek op-ed: "Open Access Responds to Public's Hunger for Knowledge"

August 10, 2008
San Jose Mercury News
By John Willinsky and Deborah Stipek
Opinion

Albert Einstein is on YouTube. Plato is on iTunes. And professors at Harvard and Stanford have begun freely sharing their work on the Web with anyone who is interested. We may just be entering a new era in the public right to knowledge.

In February, Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to create "open access" copies of all their scholarly articles. In May, Harvard Law School followed suit. Then in June, Stanford University School of Education faculty unanimously voted for a similar motion.

By endorsing this open-access policy, our Stanford colleagues have agreed that publishing an article in a respectable journal is no longer the end of it. They will also post a copy of their work online, where educators and the public can freely read what we have learned about learning. Such public access to knowledge only makes sense, given Stanford's belief that educational research - whether it examines how children master subtraction, how communities can improve opportunities for youth, or how teachers can improve their teaching - should be available to those who are interested as well as those, such as teachers, who can make productive use of such knowledge.

It also makes sense, in light of the recent public scrutiny over whether tax-exempt private universities like Harvard and Stanford do enough to further the public good. Yet it is our hope that now that we have broken this new ground, other public and private institutions will follow our lead in pursuit of knowledge as a public interest.

Certainly, the public's hunger for accessing knowledge online has never been stronger. Tens of thousands of people come together to build Wikipedia on a global scale and in many languages. Millions turn to How Stuff Works. Questions posed on public forums get answered. Regular people contribute countless reviews on everything from books and movies, to holiday resorts and gourmet recipes.

Public interest in finding information on the Web has gone academic as well, now that the virtual campus gates have begun to open. People are following links from Wikipedia to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York Times columns include links to economics papers. Visitors log on to Galaxy Zoo, eager to assist astronomers in classifying the galaxies within the massive data sets accumulated by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Students tap into open educational resources of every sort, from online textbooks to lesson materials.

Even if this new access to knowledge has yet to affect test scores or improve U.S. rankings in international comparisons in education, it does provide students with richer sources from which to learn. Citizens have new opportunities to consider and critically review sources of information. Open access of scholarly research can only add to the educational and deliberative quality of democratic life.

Are there risks with such access? Will policy blogs and school board meetings distort and misunderstand academic research and scholarship? Inevitably. But that has long been a danger, and at least now, everyone will have access to a range of relevant studies. As scholarly work becomes more public, it will be interesting to watch how researchers anticipate and try to address possible misinterpretations, hopefully without diluting the complexity, quality or rigor that distinguishes this form of knowledge.

Faculty at Harvard and Stanford have taken a bold step forward into this new age of public knowledge by insisting that they will make their work open to public discourse and debate. By doing so, they affirm the contribution that research and scholarship can make to public life, and the responsibility that higher education institutions have for generating and sharing knowledge that can help the world address some of its most challenging problems.

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JOHN WILLINSKY is Khosla Family Professor of Education at Stanford University and is director of the Public Knowledge Project. DEBORAH STIPEK is the I. James Quillen Dean and Professor of Education at Stanford University. They wrote this article for the Mercury News.