Projects & Gateways
Many organizations sponsor projects and maintain Internet resources that help support the open access approach to distributing scholarly periodical output.
In the legal scholarship area, two related projects begun in 2005 are worthy of special note. The first, known as Science Commons, is part of the larger Creative Commons enterprise. The goal of Science Commons, according to its website, “is to encourage stakeholders to create areas of free access and inquiry using standardized licenses and other means.” The second, itself part of Science Commons, is the Open Access Law Program. The Open Access Law Program provides “a set of resources to promote open access in legal publishing.”
Open access relies, in a critical way, on authors retaining their individual copyrights in the articles they write. Law review publication, as any law professor will tell you, entails entering a publication agreement of some kind with the publishing journal. To learn more about how to navigate the issue, so that you can retain your copyright, participate in open access activity, and satisfy the publishing law review, you can explore the law-specific CopyrightExperiences wiki created by Michael Froomkin and others, the Creative Commons copyright license project, and the more general page about author copyright at the University of Pennsylvania Library’s Winning Independence project.
These open access projects directed to secondary literature add to the many freely available Internet sources for primary legal materials (statutes, regulations, and cases), such as Cornell University Law School’s Legal Information Institute, the World Legal Information Institute, the Library of Congress’ Thomas, and the U.S. government’s FirstGov.gov portal.
In the broader context of open access scholarship generally, there are many notable projects and resources. Some of them are listed below, grouped by category.
Gateways With Links to More Web Resources
Projects Supporting Open Access
- SPARC (Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resoources Coalition), developed by the Association of Research Libraries
- The SPARC Open Access Newsletter, produced by Peter Suber
- Public Knowledge
- Coalition for Networked Information
- Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law Project, at the Queensland University of Technology
- eScholarship, a California Digital Library project
- American Scientist Open Access Forum, a listserv archive
