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May 7, 2008

Harvard Law School Votes for Open Access to Scholarship

Hot on the heels of their colleagues in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, professors at Harvard Law School voted unanimously last week to provide free access to their articles.

The Law School announced its move today in a news release. It will now make its scholarly articles available in a free online database.

Harvard Law School followed a similar decision in February by the university’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which became the first academic institution in the United States to make open access the default position, requiring authors to opt out rather than opt in. —Lila Guterman

Posted on Wednesday May 7, 2008 | Permalink |

Comments

  1. Finally! For all of the “public good” one-liners we hear from institutions of higher ed, their is a reputable entity willing to put it’s money where it’s cliche is.

    — fair play    May 7, 03:46 PM    #

  2. Not that big a deal. These articles are of interest only to academics and occasionally to big law firms. The articles are available on two commercial data bases—Westlaw and Lexis. Academics and big firms already are subscribed to the data bases. Every law school subscribes on behalf of its faculty and students.

    — luigi    May 7, 05:16 PM    #

  3. But Luigi, this means that students who don’t have the cash to go to Harvard can still benefit from the knowledge in those articles. Given the audience for The Chronicle of Higher Education, I don’t think it’s terribly shocking to read that the articles in question are of interest to academics.

    — Dennis G. Jerz    May 7, 07:49 PM    #

  4. Also, Luigi, having more journal articles available in open access archives will help put lower price pressure on the commercial database providers, because more of their content will no longer be exclusively available from them. It may not seem like much to have “just” Harvard, but as the open access model catches on, this may be a truly transformative development in the economics of scholarly communication.

    — Rob    May 7, 08:16 PM    #

  5. Law review articles, unlike all other articles in academic journals, are not truly peer reviewed. They are “edited” by law students who run the journals. There is thus no peer-review process in which the publisher has any investment at all. One wonders, therefore, why law reviews have not long ago been made open access since it is the equivalent of posting unrefereed papers. One also wonders, of course, how reliable they are, not having been given any true peer review.

    — Sandy Thatcher    May 8, 09:11 AM    #

 

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