Stanford to Offer Scholarly Articles on Education for Free

Faculty members at Stanford University’s school of education have voted to make scholarly articles available to the public for free, a policy change that the university says makes Stanford’s education school the first such school in the nation to join the growing “open access” movement in academia.

“We think it’s a huge gain in terms of public access, professional access, policymaker access, and lawmaker access,” said John M. Willinsky, the education professor who proposed the idea to his colleagues at the California university. “This is a body of work that is now available to schools that hasn’t been available before.”

Only 15 percent of the 1,600 education journals published around the world provide free access to their content, according to Mr. Willinsky. The rest require readers and libraries to pay to read the journals, which often...