Benjamin J. Keele, Open access to student-edited law journals, Student Lawyer, February 2009. Keele is a third-year student at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, and editor in chief of the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies. Excerpt:
...[H]ow can we be sure that even more people have access to important legal scholarship? What about readers unfamiliar with typical legal databases or scholars, especially those in other countries, who cannot afford the access fees? How can we be sure that the literature will remain accessible online for the long term, safe from business failures and obsolete file formats? Open access can address all these problems....
Law journals are generally run by volunteers (authors and student editors usually are not paid for their work) and subsidized by schools that serve the legal profession and general public.The general public often cannot afford the fees for subscription databases, thus leaving unmet a need for high-quality legal information.
Open access also is good for authors and journals because it increases their visibility and scholarly impact....
Many journals already put their print issues online and even have online supplements. This is a great start, but journals cannot fully seize the opportunity offered by open access without taking advantage of IRs' capacities for increased accessibility and preservation....
Like most worthwhile projects, there are costs to making legal scholarship freely available online. There are operational costs, such as creating digital files and hosting the content, but school libraries may be willing to contribute. Some revenue from hard-copy subscriptions and database royalties may be sacrificed, but open access and subscription models serve different parts of the market. And open access tends to increase the visibility of scholarly work, thus increasing revenue from reprint royalties.
Many recent journal articles are online, and law professors are accustomed to posting working drafts on sites like the Social Science Research Network and Bepress. It is time to put law journals online, easily accessible to all, and to keep them online by preserving them in IRs. Techsavvy student editors are in an ideal position to make that happen.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/25/2009 04:14:00 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.
