Open Access in Legal Scholarship
There has been a lot of discussion online recently about open access in the world of legal academia. As I have written before, law should be especially well positioned to advance open access for a variety of reasons, but there are also obstacles. Some of the noteworthy comments of late:
- Susan Crawford recounts a stump speech by open access evangelist and all-around smart guy Mike Carroll urging law review editors to move closer toward open access ideals in their publication practices. Mike is at the leading edge of the effort to encourage such practices, in law and elsewhere.
- Larry Solum chimes in to say, inter alia: “It seems to me that we are coming close to the point where legal academics will begin to discuss the question whether there is a professional obligation to publish only in open-access venues.”
- Michael Froomkin continues to do his part by hosting a wiki where we can all publicly disclose our experiences negotiating with individual journals for more open copyright rules.
- CyberProfs like Dan Hunter are taking SSRN to task for practices that are not in keeping with open access principles, as encapsulated in an exchange of messages posted here by Mike Madison.
The more discussion of these issues, the better — though I do wonder if those of us who tend to read and write in blogs (and, indeed, edit wikis!) are already more likely to take seriously what Solum calls an “open access imperative,” in contrast to colleagues who are less technophilic. And if so, how do we reach out effectively to the others?
UPDATE: There is a reaction by Mike Madison here, a follow-up post by Solum here, and a thread opened by Frank Pasquale at Concurring Opinions here. The posts and comments are illuminating.
Filed under: Blogging, Copyright, Education & Copyright, Internet & Society, Law School, Open Access, Scholarship
[...] Via Larry Solum’s Legal Theory Blog comes word of an important announcement from the editors of the Northwestern University Law Review. The editors have been paying close attention to the open-access debate (see here for Bill’s terrific compilation of links to many of the most interesting recent posts), and after giving the matter careful thought, are putting themselves squarely on the side of the good guys. From their announcement: Starting with the fourth issue of our ninety-ninth volume and moving forward, all of our content has been, and will continue to be, available as a PDF download through our past issues tab. As a result, anyone will be able to find Northwestern University Law Review content using an internet search engine, and download it for free. Furthermore, we will maintain a fully permissive policy regarding authors who wish to post drafts of their forthcoming articles to SSRN, Bepress or other locations on the web. That’s the easy part. [...]
[...] The nascent open access movement in legal scholarship attracted a good deal of attention last fall, including from the three of us — Bill’s October roundup of recent law-blogger posts is still a good resource, and you can also find some pertinent stories through our open access and peer production tags. Legal scholars seem to be embracing open access publishing of scholarship, not only by posting their works on sites such as SSRN and BePress, but also by policing those sites’ commitment to open access principles. [...]