Abstract: This article applies to legal scholarship the ideas developed and argued in John Willinsky’s 2006 book: 'The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship' regarding the responsibilities of scholars to make their works widely available through open access mechanisms via the Internet. Willinsky’s access principle states that “A commitment to the value and quality of research carries with it a responsibility to extend the circulation of such work as far as possible and ideally to all who are in interested in it and all who might profit by it.” For Willinsky, the transformation of scholarly journals from print to online formats means that not only researchers and scholars, but “scholarly societies, publishers, and research libraries have now to ask themselves whether or not they are using this new technology to do as much as they can to advance and improve access to research and scholarship.” This article considers the roles and responsibilities under the access principle of legal scholars and the institutions that support the creation and communication of legal scholarship for improving access to legal information The article begins with a presentation of Willinsky’s access principle, then introduces the movements for open access to law and to scholarship in other disciplines, addresses questions regarding access to the legal journal literature in the U.S., the U.K., and South Africa, discusses means for enabling access to legal literature through open access journals and scholarship repositories, and describes one law school’s experiences in providing open access to its own scholarship. It concludes with suggestions for law schools and law libraries wishing to pursue the implications of the access principle in their institutions.
From the body of the paper:
In 1998, Duke began posting new articles from its six print journals on the law school web site. The faculty task force that developed the project considered the possible effects on print subscriptions..., but concluded that the benefits of providing greater exposure for the Duke journals to scholars...would outweigh any potential reductions in income....
After ten years of providing and promoting free access, the impacts on print subscriptions to the journals have been minimal. Table 2 shows that subscribers to the law school’s interdisciplinary quarterly, Law and Contemporary Problems, have increased since the journal has been available on the web site, while subscribers to the Duke Law Journal have decreased slightly. Most notably, perhaps, are the totals for the school’s three subject specific journals. Those journals, which concentrate on international and comparative law, environmental law, and gender law, continue to have small numbers of subscribers, but each has shown significant increases in its subscriber base since the journals were made available on the web site. In addition, royalty income received from databases that provide access to articles published in the Duke journals has remained constant....
In addition to making the articles in its student-edited journals openly accessible, Duke is also committed to maximizing access to works written by the Duke Law faculty, whether or not they are published in a Duke journal. The law school makes new faculty works available through SSRN....
Since December 2005, Duke Law has maintained its own faculty scholarship repository hosted on a local server using EPrints software.130 A joint project of the law library and the law school’s information technology staff, the faculty scholarship repository aims to include comprehensive holdings of the final versions of all works by current Duke faculty members, and over time to extend coverage retrospectively to cover works by everyone who has taught at Duke....
As the Duke Law School example suggests, the possibilities for successfully promoting greater open access to legal scholarship are enhanced in the U.S. by the unique circumstances under which legal scholarship is published. The predominant publishing model, which relies on student-edited, institutionally-published journals, largely removes the interests of commercial publishers from the list of possible obstacles to open posting of papers in institutional and disciplinary repositories, or to publishing them in open access journals. Legal scholars in the U.S. feel free to post their work in the SSRN and bepress repositories, whether or not the journals that will eventually publish their articles are openly accessible or explicitly permit author postings....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/06/2008 04:49:00 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.
