Paul George and the AALL Open Access Task Force, The Future Gate to Scholarly Legal Information, a Member's Brief for the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), April 2005. Excerpt: 'Until now, the legal community has felt removed from this debate, most likely because our world appears so different from that of our colleagues in the sciences. While we have an increasing number of commercially published journals, the standard for scholarly publication is the law school journal. This model is almost the direct opposite of the scientific, technical, or medical (STM) journals; we do not have a few, centralized commercial or associational publishers, but rather a decentralized publication system with as many publishers as law schools....In law, scholarly articles are already widely available. Academic law journals are among the least expensive materials we purchase. The average price for a non-commercial journal was $34.04 in 2003, compared with more than $215 for a commercially published law journal, according to AALL's Price Index for Legal Publications....[F]ree access is available through several avenues. Besides making earlier copies of their articles available on their personal Web pages, authors will also post versions on popular repository sites, such as SSRN and BePress....We librarians are in the best position to create awareness of open access issues in our own institutions and libraries. All law librarians should educate their constituencies about the benefits and possibilities offered by open access publishing....In academic law libraries, the faculty authors themselves often are unaware of the benefits of electronic publication. Faculty must learn that it should not assign its copyright interests to the journals, which creates barriers to future distribution of published works....For those who want to look further into the future, we will briefly raise the question of whether it is time to discuss the possibility of a public library of law, modeled on The Public Library of Science (PLOS).' The report also has a good sidebar on what Duke University Law School is doing about OA. (Thanks to Dan Hunter.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/08/2005 11:10:00 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.
