materials and scholarship, and explores whether “crowdsourced,” Wiki-centered efforts may achieve comparable results at lower cost. It concludes with an assessment of some of the drawbacks and limitations of the “crowdsourced” approach.
II. Policy Background: The Open Access Imperative
A. Open Access to Scholarship
“Open access,” in the sense of making documentary materials available over the Internet for reading and copying without charge,[1] is an emerging phenomenon in the legal academy. In the legal academic community, the “open access” label is associated primarily with free distribution of scholarly works. The discussion has revolved around whether to improve access to faculty scholarship, how best to do so, and what it might mean for the traditional legal publishing paradigm.[2]
At one level, enlisting faculty support for scholarly open-access initiatives consists merely of fostering personal and institutional self-
- ↑ See Peter Suber, Open Access Overview, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm (last visited Sept. 29, 2009) (“Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.”). There is no single settled definition of “open access,” although most conventional understandings of the term share common traits (the most important being the relative ease and low cost of access as compared with the traditional roprietary publication paradigm). See generally John Willinsky, The Access Principle: The Case For Open Access to Research and Scholarship App. A (2006) (cataloging “ten flavors of open access”); Lawrence B. Solum, Download It While It’s Hot: Open Access and Legal Scholarship, 10 Lewis & Clark L. Rev. 841, 856–57 (2006). The open access movement is a global phenomenon guided and informed by a number of declarations of principles issued by international groups, a full cataloging of which lies beyond the scope of the present essay. See, e.g., Richard A. Danner, Applying the Access Principle in Law: The Responsibilities of the Legal Scholar, 35 Int’l J. Leg. Info. 355, 359–66 (2007) (summarizing several of the pertinent declarations); David W. Opderbeck, The Penguin’s Paradox: The Political Economy of International Intellectual Property and the Paradox of Open Intellectual Property Models, 18 Stan. L. & Pol’y Rev. 101, 107–09 (2007) (recounting pertinent history).
By focusing on issues involving the legality of access to the underlying content, most discussions of open access elide related issues such as the openness of the software platforms used in creating and reading the content or the openness of the networks over which the content flows. See, e.g., Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering (Ronald Deibert et al., eds., 2008) (surveying state actors’ controls over Internet information flows); Stephen Murgatroyd, Access to Knowledge in an e-Connected World, in The E-Connected World: Risks and Opportunities 79 (Stephen Coleman, ed., 2003) (acknowledging interrelationships among these concerns). This essay adheres to convention in focusing on the question of open access to content, while recognizing that other issues may carry greater force in particular circumstances.
- ↑ See, e.g., Joseph Scott Miller, Forward: Why Open Access to Scholarship Matters, 10 Lewis & Clark L. Rev. 733 (2006); Nicholas Bramble, Preparing Academic Scholarship for an Open Access World, 20 Harv. J.L. & Tech. 209 (2006).
