Page:Crowdsourcing and Open Access.djvu/6

publishing solves both problems by making current scholarship available worldwide at little expense. For that reason, faculty at several influential research institutions have voted to authorize archiving and distribution of their scholarship on open-access terms. Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences did so (by unanimous vote) early in 2008,^[1] and the Harvard Law School faculty unanimously followed suit a few months later.^[2] The Massachusetts Institute of Technology adopted a university-wide open access mandate in early 2009,^[3] and similar measures are pending or have been adopted by other universities.^[4]

The adoption of open-access mandates by university faculty has led to the creation of institutional electronic repositories of scholarly works. Duke Law School’s faculty scholarship repository includes faculty papers dating back over half a century.^[5] Harvard’s new DASH repository may be unique in including student-authored papers alongside faculty scholarship.^[6] Nor is the push for scholarly open access confined to elite institutions: the Oklahoma City University School of Law, for example, maintains a repository of faculty scholarship extending back four decades.^[7] Cross-institutional repositories such as SSRN and BEPress hold even larger collections of faculty scholarship from universities worldwide.^[8]

Some law journals have also committed to publishing on an open-access model. The Science Commons organization (an affiliate

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very sketchy. In the least-developed countries, such access is virtually nonexistent.”).

1. See, e.g., Michael J. Madison et al., The University as Constructed Cultural Commons, 30 Wash. U. J.L. & Pol’y 365, 399–400 (2009).
2. See Harvard Law faculty votes for ‘open access’ to scholarly articles, http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2008/05/07_openaccess.html (last visited Oct. 6, 2009).
3. See Natasha Plotkin, MIT Will Publish All Faculty Articles Free In Online Repository, The Tech, Mar. 20, 2009, available at http://tech.mit.edu/V129/PDF/N14.pdf.
4. On the other hand, the news is not uniformly favorable. In April 2009, the faculty of the University of Maryland defeated a resolution encouraging (but not requiring) that faculty members make their scholarship available in open-access repositories.
5. See Duke Law School, Faculty Scholarship Repository, http://www.law.duke.edu/scholarship/repository (last visited Oct. 6, 2009). The earliest work presently found in the collection is Robinson O. Everett, Securing Security, 16 Law & Contemp. Probs. 49 (1951), available at http://eprints.law.duke.edu/365/. See generally Danner, supra note 8, at 393–94.
6. The DASH repository is online at http://dash.harvard.edu/ (last visited Oct. 6, 2009).
7. See Oklahoma City University School of Law, Faculty Scholarship Repository, http://www.okcu.edu/law/facultyandadministration/publications/index.php (last visited Oct. 6, 2009).
8. See, e.g., Parker, supra note 11, at 431–32; Jessica Litman, The Economics of Open Access Law Publishing, 10 Lewis & Clark L. Rev. 779, 791–92 (2006); Black & Caron, supra note 10.