“Accessibility, Sustainability, and Universality”: An Interview with Open Access Scholar John Willinsky

Abstract

Dr. John Willinsky is an educator, author, and advocate of the Open Access Movement who seeks to redefine scholarly publishing as a public resource built upon accessibility, sustainability, and universality. Dr. Willinsky is a Professor Emeritus in the Stanford Graduate School of Education where he also serves as the Khosla Family Professor. Additionally, Dr. Willinsky directs The Public Knowledge Project – an Open Source publishing platform housing scholarly journals, books, and preprints that seeks the global advancement of Open Access and Open Science. He is the author of The Access Principle (2005) and frequently analyzes the relationships between research, scholarship, the publishing industry, the internet, and accessibility in his additional publications that have been featured in Learned Publishing, Perspectives on Medical Education, and the Canadian Journal of Higher Education among others.

Open Access is an international movement that supports open online access to academic information, including research, publications, and data across disciplines. The movement opposes the traditional subscription model of scholarly conversation and instead seeks to make information freely available to readers. Similar movements like Open Science and Open Source demonstrate the movement’s discipline defying reach and the desire for accessible and collaborative research networks in not only scholarly publishing, but academia at large. 

I was excited to speak with Dr. Willinsky because of his significance to my own research into the Open Access Movement as well his practical approaches to increasing accessibility within the classroom, the higher education system, and the scholarly publishing industry at large. This interview was conducted in October 2024.