The recent publication of The Access Principle by John Willinsky has occasioned discussion in forums that don’t typically address the question of Open Access. One of these venues is the New England Journal of Medicine, whose April 13th issue included a book review / anti-OA editorial by Martin Frank.

Like many Open Access critics, Frank quotes worst-case numbers for the potential costs of an OA model — numbers that have been cast into doubt other places. In addition, he seems to have a special animus towards the National Institutes of Health’s new Public Access policy. He hints darkly:

The ready availability of content on PubMed Central could lead to subscription cancellations and accelerate the transition to an author-pays publishing model, the economic implications of which are not adequately evaluated by Willinsky.

While such concerns may be understandable, experience with the arXiv e-print repository suggests that conventional publishing and freely available content can indeed co-exist. At any rate, subscription cancellations are already a seemingly permanent part of the library landscape. Spiraling costs have pushed the current system of scholarly communication towards the brink of unsustainability.

Frank’s final point bears close examination, particularly since this is exactly where the strongest argument for Open Access resides:

At a time of shrinking budgets for biomedical research, does it make sense to spend scarce dollars on publication costs instead of on research to develop treatments and cures for disease?

To which one could just as easily reply, “Does it make sense to spend scarce dollars on research, only to consign the results to a place where they might never be seen by the people that could build upon them?”

Anecdotal evidence suggests that our faculty are becoming much like our undergraduates: if they can’t open the full-text directly from a citation, they often don’t bother with an article. Leveraging limited resources and ensuring the widest possible use of research is precisely why Open Access is not just a librarian’s issue, but one of critical importance to scholarship as a whole.