Questions about access to scholarship go back farther than recent debates over subscription prices, rights, and electronic archives suggest. The great libraries of the past - from the fabled collection at Alexandria to the early public libraries of nineteenth-century America - stood as arguments for increasing access. In The Access Principle, John Willinsky describes the latest chapter in this ongoing story - online open access publishing by scholarly journals - and makes a case for open access as a public good."

Includes bibliographical references (pages [245]-269) and index.

Opening -- Access -- Copyright -- Associations -- Economics -- Cooperative -- Development -- Public -- Politics -- Rights -- Reading -- indexing -- History -- Appendixes: Ten flavors of open access ; Scholarly association budgets ; Journal management economies ; An open access cooperative ; Indexing of the serial literature ; Metadata for journal publishing.