Unintentional Benefits Of Open Access: The Broader Impact Of Making Publications Free

When I was in undergrad, we would photocopy articles down in the basement of MacOdrum library at my alma mater, Carleton University. You’d have to find the call number of the journal, head down into the basement, find the right row, then bookshelf, and finally discover someone had already taken the journal to photocopy it. I learned quickly to check the photocopy room first to see if someone already had the article rather than looking for it first.

But now we’ve moved into a world where everything is done electronically. Through the power of PubMed, Google Scholar and numerous others, you can obtain PDFs of many articles via your institution. And now, many of those articles are available under Open Access rules – so anyone can access them, regardless of academic affiliation.

Restrictions around accessing articles have several major consequences for those of us teaching courses in higher education. These range from the mundane, such as how it prevents us from emailing journal articles to each other, to the dramatic, in that it limits how easily we can share lecture notes and discussions with the public at large.