... All around the world, without centralized planning, institutes have sprung up in response to a pressing need: non-lawyers have a real use for legal information, but can’t get it. In countries across several continents, new initiatives online are successfully giving the general public information that they wouldn’t have been able to search before, information that used to be controlled exclusively by the legal information publishing businesses. ...
[A]ccess to information, and especially legal information, are a fundamental source of our ability to be agents as humans. Our framework under which we function as humans involves our day to day knowledge of physics, social interactions, and the like, and the knowledge is necessary for us to move around in a physical world, have friends and business relationships, etc. The traditional world of legal information, however, has failed on even this basic level to provide the public information necessary to allow the public to develop to their full potential as substantively relevant agents in the legal world. ...
People become agents in a legal or legislative or judicial realm where they before would have only been relevant through hired services. They can see the reach of the established law in their countries stretching into their lives, and evaluate it on their own, looking up history or international comparisons rather than relying on talk show hysteria to guide them.
And [the initiatives are] only just starting their work. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 6/04/2008 01:02:00 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.
