Access to legal scholarship May 5, 2008
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Open Access and Institutional Repositories, Scholarly Publishing , trackbackI have written several times before about scholarship in the field of law (here, for example, and here). For a variety of reasons, legal scholarship is an excellent laboratory for experiments in changing the traditional structures and economics of scholarship. Both open access and informal forms of scholarship have been more readily adopted and more quickly influential in law than in other fields. The unusual structure of most legal scholarship is a partial explanation for these facts, but many of the experiences and observations made in the legal arena offer substantive lessons for scholarship in other fields.
Nowhere are these experiences and observations better synthesized than in a recent article by Richard Danner, Ruffy Research Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Information Services at
One of Danner’s observations particularly struck me when I read this article, and that impression was confirmed by a conversation I had this week with several librarians. Contrary to the oft-repeated claim that open access will inevitably lead to loss of subscription income for publishers, Danner documents the experience of
Overall, Danner’s article is a masterful analysis of the structure of publishing in a particular field and how the “access principle,” a concept taken from John Willinsky’s book of the same name, could transform a field of scholarship. In spite of the oddities of legal scholarship, Danner is very successful at offering both an analysis and a call to action that deserve to be translated and applied in other fields.
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[...] travers le carnet virtuel de la bibliothèque de droit de la Duke University, Kevin Smith nous invite à lire l’essai suivant : Danner, Richard A. (2007) Applying the Access [...]