Prior AmSci Topic Thread:
"The Special Case of Law Reviews" (started 2003)
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3155.html
Law Library Director and Assistant Professor of Law at the University
of New Mexico School of Law, Carol Parker, has published an article in
the New Mexico Law Review, Vol. 37, No. 2, Summer 2007 (just blogged by
Peter Suber in Open Access News), entitled "Institutional Repositories
and the Principle of Open Access: Changing the Way We Think About Legal
Scholarship."
Though a bit out of date now in some of its statistics, because things
are moving so fast, this article gives a very good overview of OA and
concludes that, no, Law Reviews are not a special case: Those articles,
too, and their authors and institutions, would benefit from being
self-archived in the authors' institutional repositories to make them
OA.
Professor Parker conjectures that most potential users worldwide already
have affordable subscription access to all the law journal articles they
need via Westlaw and Lexis, so the advantage of OA in Law might be just
one of speed and convenience, not a remedy for access-denial.
(This might be the case, but I wonder if anyone actually has quantitative
evidence, canvassing users across institutions worldwide for research
accessibility, and comparing Law with other disciplines?)
In any case, if you haven't already seen it, Professor Parker's article
is highly recommended and in light of the recent NIH, ERC, and Harvard
self-archiving mandates and ongoing deliberations about further mandates
worldwide, the article is especially timely.
Stevan Harnad
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.h
tml
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/
UNIVERSITIES and RESEARCH FUNDERS:
If you have adopted or plan to adopt a policy of providing Open Access
to your own research article output, please describe your policy at:
http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/71-guid.html
http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/136-guid.html
OPEN-ACCESS-PROVISION POLICY:
BOAI-1 ("Green"): Publish your article in a suitable toll-access journal
http://romeo.eprints.org/
OR
BOAI-2 ("Gold"): Publish your article in an open-access journal if/when
a suitable one exists.
http://www.doaj.org/
AND
in BOTH cases self-archive a supplementary version of your article
in your own institutional repository.
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/
http://archives.eprints.org/
http://openaccess.eprints.org/
Received on Wed Mar 12 2008 - 01:40:34 GMT