"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."--Jacket.