Duke Law School is justifiably proud of its OA initiatives. From its recent press release, Duke Law Journals Lead with Open Access to Scholarship (undated): 'Duke Law School's seven student-edited journals were prominently featured in the June 6 th unveiling of the Open Access Law Program, an initiative of Creative Commons and its Science Commons Publishing Project. The announcement of the Open Access Law Program was notable not only for the encouragement and support the Program will provide for increasing free access to scholarly literature in law, but for its acknowledgment of Duke Law School's longstanding commitment to making legal scholarship freely available on the World Wide Web to international and interdisciplinary audiences, as well as to legal scholars. Unlike most other law reviews, Duke's journals all explicitly allow authors to post articles published in the journals without restriction on freely-accessible third party web sites, as well as on Internet sites under their own control. Duke's journals have already been operating in conformance with the newly stated principles of the Open Access Law Program. William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law James Boyle sees strong institutional benefits from the policy: "The promise that their works will be accessible world wide to anyone with an Internet connection clearly attracts excellent authors to our journals. At the same time, Duke Law satisfies part of our public service obligation to make our research available as widely as possible, without regard to the income of the potential reader. It's a win-win situation."...In addition to publishing its journals under open access principles, the Law School encourages Duke faculty to make their own works easily available to other scholars in electronic formats. Duke Law School Information Services has created a comprehensive open repository of current and retrospective Duke Law faculty scholarship at http://eprints.law.duke.edu/. The repository provides full-text access to faculty writings through direct searching, as well as through links from online bibliographies, curriculum vitae and other means....Professor Boyle credits Richard Danner, Senior Associate Dean for Information Services and Archibald C. and Frances Fulk Rufty Research Professor of Law with having inspired Duke's commitment: "Thanks to Dick's leadership, our journals have all been freely available online since 1996-97. In Internet years, that is an almost geological length of time."'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/22/2005 09:42:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
