An Introduction
What is Open Access?
In August 1991, physicist Paul Ginsparg launched the e-print archive space now known as arXiv.org. From that key event in the Internet-based self-archiving of scholarly research papers, the open access phenomenon has grown dramatically. Philosopher and longtime open access advocate Peter Suber marks many of the key events in the growth of open access scholarship and publishing in his Timeline of the Open Access Movement.
What, then, is “open access” scholarship and publishing? Descriptions vary in this or that detail, but one of the core source documents in open access - the Budapest Open Access Initiative Declaration (Feb. 2002) - sums up “open access” as follows:
By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
Or, as University of Pennsylvania Law School’s Library Director Paul George recently put it, open access is “the electronic publication of scholarly work that is available for free without copyright constraints other than attribution.” Paul George, Members’ Briefing: The Future Gate to Scholarly Legal Information, AALL Spectrum (April 2005).
The two basic open access strategies are (1) self-archiving, in which scholars place their articles (pre-print or post-print) in freely accessible Internet-based archives; and (2) open access publishing, in which the journal publisher ensures permanent open access to its journal’s content.
You can learn more about open access at the pertinent Wikipedia entry, as well as in Peter Suber’s Open Access Overview.
Open Access in Legal Scholarship
Open access has spread rapidly in the sciences, driven by the high cost of commercial publishers’ subscription rates. For example, from 1984 to 2001, the price of library subscriptions to physical sciences periodicals rose 615%; the overall growth of the CPI in the same period was 70%. Berkeley Electronic Press, The Scholarly Communication Crisis.
Scholarly legal periodicals, with their different publishing model of school-subsidized, student-edited law reviews, are relative late-comers to the open access question. Late or not, however, many producers and consumers of legal scholarship are engaging with open access issues.
Lewis & Clark Law School joined the debate in March 2006. Specifically, the Lewis & Clark Law Review hosted its Spring Symposium on the topic of “Open Access Publishing and the Future of Legal Scholarship.”
The Boley Law Library at Lewis & Clark Law School, in conjunction with this March 2006 conference, offers this set of web pages as a resource for those who are interested in learning more about open access scholarship and publishing, in both law and other fields.
This pages serves as a gateway. The links in the column on the right-hand side of this page take you pages on individual topics, such as core documents. If you learn of additional information and resources to which you think we should link here, please let us know. E-mail jsmiller at lclark dot edu.
