Abstract: Technology increasingly drives the evolving nature of the library's role in managing faculty publications. Libraries not only create physical archives of faculty scholarship, but take on the active role of facilitating immediate access to content. Trends in legal scholarship, including new formats such as blogs and podcasts and the open access initiatives, compel libraries to develop creative solutions such as enhanced bibliographies, searchable databases, and digital repositories to manage access, preserve, and disseminate faculty writings.
From the body of the paper:
The demise of exclusive rights also changes the landscape of access to faculty scholarship. Open Access, the most significant recent development in scholarly publishing, seeks to provide free online access to scholarly literature. In the open access environment, authors retain copyright privileges in their works, whether self or commercially published. Methods of open access distribution include publication in open access journals, deposit of pre-prints or post-prints in a digital archive (e.g., SSRN or bepress), and publication on one’s own and/or an institutional web site. Open access addresses the scholar’s primary motivation: to be read and to be read widely.
Open access is not, incidentally, a phenomenon recognized only in the academy. Law firm web sites increasingly include publications repositories. While practitioner scholarship occasionally makes its way into traditional law journal publications, more often such articles will appear in practice-oriented newsletters and reporting services or simply as self-published by the firm. Such a repository accomplishes firm marketing goals and, indeed, may be the primary purpose, but it nonetheless also contributes to the sharing of ideas in the practice world. Similarly, the law school's publications repository launches the ideas of its authors into the scholarly community, which might be its primary purpose, while at the same time marketing the expertise of its faculty....
Nearly fifty legal journals have already adopted the Creative Commons’ Open Access Law Journal [Principles] and there is no doubt the list will grow....
The open access movement makes it imperative for librarians to recognize, accommodate, and even promote scholarship posted in open access repositories. The open access principles are the very principles that drive library collections. Think back to the “open shelf” movement in public libraries, the very novel idea, at the time, that there should be no barrier between the user and information. Electronic resources shrouded behind passwords and licenses are in many ways a step back from such library ideals. Open access repositories are a leap forward, and what we are all about, after all, which is removing barriers to access. The Budapest Open Access Initiative states it well, “An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make an unprecedented public good.” ...
It is critically important for librarians to assume leadership roles and maintain responsibility for institutional repositories if they are to remain relevant during this next phase of the technological revolution....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/21/2007 04:33:00 PM.
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.
