Abstract: Professor Milles argues that the open access movement in legal scholarship fails to address --and in fact diverts resources from-- the real problem facing law libraries today: the soaring costs of nonscholarly, commercially published, practitioner-oriented legal publications. He suggests that one solution to this problem is for law schools to redirect some of their resources --intellectual capital, reputation, and student labor-- to publishing legal information for practitioners rather than legal scholars.
Comment. OA would benefit legal practitioners as well as legal scholars, and there are more legal practitioners than legal scholars. Hence, OA initiatives for legal scholarship are addressing one problem rather than another, and may be addressing a smaller problem rather than a larger one. But I see no reason to say that OA for practitioners is "the real problem", when OA for scholars is another real problem. We should be able to recognize plural problems and encourage parallel processing to attack them all. Moreover, there are good reasons to start with legal scholarship, since its authors willingly (even eagerly) publish it without expecting to be paid. The kind of practitioner-oriented publications Milles is concerned about tend to pay royalties, which makes them higher-hanging fruit for the OA movement. I applaud attempts to pluck that fruit. But at the same time I want to give priority to OA for royalty-free rather than royalty-producing literature.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/30/2006 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.
