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February 21, 2006

Michael Lines

IP and Open Access Discussions Begin to Converge.

Maybe I’m slow, but it seems to me that the Open Access movement and IP Law bloggers have remained mostly unconnected in public fora. IP lawyers tend to blog on a range of substantive IP issues, and OA proponents, where they discuss the law, tend to focus on copyright. But today Peter Suber of Open Access points to this article by James Boyle, an IP professor and OA proponent, in the Financial Times which seems to bridge some of the gap. These two older articles are also worth reading: one, two. The latter outlines how, in the WIPO process, "[t]he public interest in competition, access, free speech and vigorous technological markets takes a back seat." Interestingly, he also points out how "intellectual property laws are created without any empirical evidence that they are necessary or that they will help rather than hurt" and how IP law "is attracting attention from economists, political scientists and people who simply want to make money."

We all suspect that, for a variety of very compelling reasons, the open access model of publishing is bound to affect legal publishing on a wide scale at some point. Among the reasons, I would place access to the law, often cited as a fundamental requirement of a free society, first. A close second is the way that the public pays twice for primary legal materials: once when they are created, a second time when they are accessed.

I searched the SLAW archives for the phrase 'open access,' and Simon's two posts here and here (attracting no comments) were the only results.

Here are some of the materials I have been collecting on this topic, as I begin to contemplate how to broach this topic with others. I wonder if other SLAW-ers have similar collections waiting to be shared, and whether any of us have initiated open access projects.

Open Access proponents
The SPARC Open Access Newsletter
Open Access Law: Principles

Publisher's views
U.K. Parliamentary Committee Holds Hearings on Scientific Publishing

Research and other articles
Library Access to Scholarship
Open Access Overview
The Impact of Open Access Journals: A Citation Study from Thomson ISI
Walled Gardens
Open Access to Law in Developing Countries
The Life of the Law Online
"Never Ending, Still Beginning": A Defense of Electronic Law Journals from the Perspective of the E Law Experience

Projects
Open Journal Systems
Public Knowledge Project
MIT Open Courseware
PLOS – Public Library of Science
Stargate
Open Archives Initiative

Resources
Directory of Open Access Journals

Bloggers
Peter Suber
Michael Geist
Peter Binkley
Walt Crawford

Peer Reviewed Journals
Ariadne
D-Lib Magazine
The Journal of Electronic Publishing

Michael is a librarian, webmaster, and researcher at the University of Victoria Diana M. Priestly Law Library. He has an MLS and MA (Medieval History) from the University of Toronto, and is the father of two youngsters.
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One Comment on “IP and Open Access Discussions Begin to Converge.”

  1. Simon Fodden says:
    March 3, 2006 at 9:34 am

    Michael, here are a few more links I came across recently:

    University Affairs: The Bottom Line on Open Access
    Institutional digital repositories/E-Archives : INFLIBNET’s initiative in India
    Free Pint Newsletter: "Digital Repositories in UK universities and colleges" By Neil Jacobs

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