In early 2009, the directors of some of the largest and most prestigious law libraries in the United States issued the “Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship,” a document that has been signed by over 50 librarians and other supporters nationwide.[1] The Durham Statement envisions a wholesale restructuring of the endeavor of producing and disseminating legal scholarship: not only does it call for the increased deployment of stable digital repositories of faculty scholarship (as already exist in many forms), it goes further and calls upon law schools to rely solely on such digital repositories and to cease publishing law journals in printed form.[2]
On the question of open access to primary legal source materials, Professor Ian Gallacher believes law schools (and libraries) should take a leading role.[3] Making primary source materials freely available would do much to serve the large number of law school graduates who practice outside large-firm settings.[4] Gallacher goes on to argue that law schools’ institutional incentives may make them more desirable and effective custodians of primary source materials than private publishers (whose proprietary incentives may discourage widespread or free distribution) or even the government itself.[5] Gallacher’s essay concludes by articulating a number of design standards that should be adopted by open-access archives of primary legal source materials, including: (1) universal openness and accessibility (whether with or without charge); (2) completeness; (3) flexibility in access and presentation; (4) flexibility in search and indexing methods; (5) speed; (6) reliability; (7) permanence; (8) vendor neutrality; (9) a citator or validator to identify doubtful precedents; and (10) community involvement in the development and maintenance of the archive.[6] Some of the most robust nonproprietary legal databases already share many of these characteristics, with the
- ↑ See Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship, at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/durhamstatement (last visited Nov. 5, 2009) [hereafter “Durham Statement”].
- ↑ See id. (“We therefore urge every U.S . law school to commit to ending print publication of its journals and to making definitive versions of journals and other scholarship produced at the school immediately available upon publication in stable, open, digital formats, rather than in print.”).
- ↑ See Ian Gallacher, “Aux Armes, Citoyens!”: Time for Law Schools to Lead the Movement for Free and Open Access to the Law, 40 U. Toledo L. Rev. 1 (2008).
- ↑ See id. at 14–19.
- ↑ See id. at 21–31.
- ↑ See id. at 32–49.
