On the Right to Research: An interview with John Willinsky
We feature in this inaugural edition of the Public Scholarship Interview series a conversation with Professor John Willinsky at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. Dr. Willinsky is an expert on scholarly communication and a long-standing advocate of open access to research. He has decades of experience and research on making knowledge and research more accessible for the public. We are grateful to share this space to engage in a candid and fruitful conversation with Dr. Willinsky about what “public scholarship” means and how his work connects to this idea.
Minju Choi (MC): What does “public scholarship” mean to you?
John Willinsky (JW): I’m delighted to see this public scholarship initiative get underway and more credit to you, Minju, and your colleagues for both raising the profile and walking the talk of this approach to research. Now what comes to mind when I see the term “public scholarship” is academics writing op-eds in newspapers, being very active on social media, and writing books that sell well in bookstores. I think of people like Linda Darling-Hammond working at the state and federal level on matters of education policy. I’ve also been a follower of public intellectuals in the tradition of Jane Addams, Matthew Arnold, and bell hooks in education who are constantly active – often in an activist way – in public forums. Yet there is another side to this sense of bringing together “public” and “scholarship,” which I’d introduce into this conversation on this admirable question of how we make scholarship public. This other side is based on a public right to research and knowledge, generally, which might be said to undergird a school of education.
So while there is much to be said about improving the communication of research, about bringing scholarship into the realm of everyday language in public forums, that is not quite the same thing as recognizing the public’s right to such work. My starting point is not with the making of public scholarship. It is with making scholarship public. That is, my work with scholars, societies, publishers, and librarians is to help the public have access to research as a starting point for any further helpful work in creating forms of public scholarship within this great body of work.
I started down this path to exploring the possibilities of universal public access to research in 1998. I had been working with a local newspaper to combine research with journalism. My students and I had arranged, in this early instance of public scholarship, to seek out the research behind newspaper articles, which we planned to make publicly available through the newspaper. In this case, journalists were doing local stories on computers in schools and we hoped to provide their readers with related research on topics such as gender and computers. In the process I discovered, for the first time I’m embarrassed to say, that I couldn't share this or really any research with the public at that time in light of the library’s contracts with publishers. Well, I could invite people to visit the university library, but in the dawning of the digital era that did not seem to cut it.
That's when I just decided that as a professor of literacy education who believed that education research contributed to teaching and learning, among many other things, how is it that I was producing research that I could not share with the public? Even though I might write things like “this article is committed to better teaching, this article is for the families and communities that our schools serve,” that the article could not be shared with those groups suddenly seemed terribly wrong to me.
Now, one thing people often say to me about public access to research is that the public simply cannot understand research and that research is by nature inaccessible; it's so hard to understand and even harder to interpret. This argument about having to prove that one has a capacity to understand something in order to qualify for access to it has been used most infamously to prevent African Americans from having the vote for want of an ability to answer questions about such matters as the Constitution. That's just not how voting or knowledge rights should work.
MC: Could you tell us about the ways in which you have worked to make scholarship public, particularly through your work on open access?
JW: In the early days, it was challenging to convince my colleagues to make their work freely available. I soon learned that you can't just exhort your colleagues to liberate their research. You need to give people something more than that. And so what I ended up doing was repurposing the Public Knowledge Project that I had created at the time with a team of students who could help build an open source (free) publishing platform. We were giving the platform away to help encourage publishers and societies to make the research free to everyone. First released 20 years ago, Open Journal Systems or OJS, as it is called, has grown into the most widely used journal publishing system in the world. More than 32,000 journals use it, with roughly 80 percent of them in the Global South, and close to 90 percent providing open access to their published research.
To step back from my own work, and consider the larger question of how open access has fared more broadly, studies conducted by others suggest that about 40% of the research is freely available today. It is common now for newspapers not only to cite research, but to provide links to freely available studies. We have certainly seen public interest in such work increase with the pandemic. Still, this ready access to research has also caused some confusion among the public, as both peer-reviewed articles and preprints are subject to news stories, without clear and important distinctions being made.
Confusions such as this make apparent that while open access may be necessary for keeping the public reliably informed, it's not sufficient. I'm not assuming that open access is a magical solution to the challenges of misinformation. We need to educate the public about the nature of research. I’m working with GSE doctoral student Danny Pimentel, for example, on a project teaching high school students about peer review and how to look at the parts of a journal to see if it's trustworthy or not. What I'm assuming in all of this is that we are capable of doing a better job of educating the public for a world in which knowledge is freely available.
This doesn't mean that everyone needs to be able to interpret molecular structure diagrams. Rather it assumes that the public will have some appreciation of what distinguishes research from other forms of knowledge, and how to tell when a statement is based on some level of evidence or is an unsubstantiated claim.
MC: What does equity mean to you in the context of the work you are pursuing?
JW: The work I do is concerned, in the first instance, with how research and scholarship is not equitably available to all who are interested in seeing and using such work. More concretely, my efforts are directed toward ensuring that others’ research, say, on anti-racist curricular materials and other topics that have equity at their core, is not locked up in journals that aren't publicly accessible to teachers, students, families, and communities.
The decolonization of scholarly communication is another equity element to this work. One of the reasons that open access is important, and that we offer open source publishing platforms, is to counter the imperial geography of center and periphery. This colonial legacy is reflected in the extent to which academic centers in the Global North dominate the production and publication of knowledge, often based on data drawn from what then stand as the peripheral regions to these centers. Scholars working outside of the centers are made peripheral to knowledge production by the fact that their institutions cannot afford access to the center’s publications. Open access to all research is one remedy, as is equipping scholars working throughout the world with the means to organize new scholarly publishing ventures.
The Kenyan novelist and essayist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o referred to the decolonization process as a moving away from the traditional centers of knowledge and authority to a global distribution of opportunities and participation.
And with that let me thank you, Minju, for the opportunity to participate in this promising new public scholarship initiative. I do believe our efforts complement each other.
The dialogue with Dr. Willinsky highlights the public’s “right to research,” as one of a number of arguments to make research freely available. Dr. Willinsky’s work on open access to research calls for not only greater attention but also informed action to make this “right to know” accessible for all.
See additional work by Professor John Willinsky:
- Public Knowledge Project
- The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship
- The Strategic Education Research Program and the Public Value of Research
- Copyright’s Broken Promise: How to Restore the Law’s Ability to Promote the Progress of Science
