The main goal of the free access to law movement is to spread free access to such legal information to those countries that do not have it. A by-product of the development of local free access systems should be to prevent provision of a country’s legal information becoming the monopoly of any organisation, whether it be governments, local legal publishers, or international legal publishers.
The secondary goal should be for the local providers of free access to legal information to establish networks which facilitate searches over all of their content, so as to create a facility comparable to the global reach of the multinational legal publishers. This may seem a utopian goal, but some commentators already treat it as plausible, and the network of free access legal information providers has grown to include almost 500 databases of legal materials in less than five years, drawn from 55 countries. This paper focuses on this secondary goal, and is largely about the World Legal Information Institute (WorldLII) project, and the context out of which it comes....
Comment. The same authors published an article with the same title (minus the "2002-2005") in the Journal of Electronic Resources in Law Libraries, vol. 1, no. 1 (2006). The journal has since been discontinued and the original URL for the article has died. But see my blogged version of the abstract.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/17/2008 09:02:00 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.
