Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice
Call for Papers on Access to Knowledge

We invite submissions dealing with social justice in access to knowledge in the broadest sense. Without
limiting the scope of the subject-matter and its treatment, we would especially welcome timely and
topical papers that focus on access to knowledge and its intersection with development issues, cultural
rights, intellectual property rights, international human rights, international trade, open access publishing,
the A2K movement or any combination thereof. Deadline for submissions is MAY 31, 2013

Articles, case/legislation comments and notes, book reviews, or other manuscripts will be considered
for review. . . . [more]

The continued development of CanLII into a comprehensive source for primary legal information has created an environment where, over time, the incremental cost of primary legal information in Canada will deviate toward zero. This has important implications for both commercial and non-profit legal publishers in Canada, because it will disrupt current business models as clients continue to become more unwilling to pay for this content at existing rates. This change will create particular opportunities for CanLII to leverage its position as the provider of free information in ways that are not open to those with a fee based, closed access . . . [more]

Almost a year ago I remarked here that the Ontario Reports, long a staple — and privilege — of membership in the Law Society of Upper Canada, were freely available online. (The reaction at the time was one of mild interest: CanLII provides all the free access we’re likely to require. And, too, the online ORs are delivered up in what I regard as a less than user friendly fashion that takes awkward advantage of what the web has to offer a publisher.)

For what it’s worth, I noticed the other day that the ORs are indexed by Google . . . [more]

The Canadian Legal Information Institute, CanLII, has just announced that it will be introducing an API (application programming interface) in mid-March. This will allow developers and others to obtain direct access to the CanLII database in order to use the resulting data within their applications or web pages.

This is very good news indeed — and a very smart move by CanLII. If you’re in the “business” of giving data away, as CanLII is, you want to make the transfer as easy and enticing as possible. As the announcement says:

We hope law schools, legal information and legal aid resources,

Scholarly publisher bepress recently launched The Digital Commons Network that “brings together scholarship from hundreds of universities and colleges, providing open access to peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work” [About page]

One of the subsets is the Law Network, which already has more than 100,000 articles from 170 institutions. The institutions all seem to be U.S. universities.

It is possible to sign up for free to follow all new legal scholarship, content in a specific practice area, from a specific institution or author.

This appears to be an interesting complement . . . [more]

In case there are any Slaw readers who have not yet learned of it, I thought I’d point you to some posts about Edwin Mellen Press‘s lawsuit against McMaster librarian Dale Askey (and against McMaster University as well). EMP claims Askey defamed them online in a post, and a series of comments to it, entitled “The Curious Case of Edwin Mellen Press” (a turn on Dickens’s “The Curious Case of Edwin Drood,” by the way) and in the Notice of Action begun in June 2012 they ask for $3,500,000.00 in damages.

The Notice of Action is available online here . . . [more]

There is a fantastic article in the Attorney at Work Blog by Daniel Gold today titled Save Random Sparks of Genius. Part of the article discusses the art of capture:

Finding a way to capture information anytime and anywhere—and then do something with that information—is critical to our success. It allows us to snare random sparks of genius like a hunter gets his prey.

Slaw has featured posts on capture using technology tools like Evernote, and Storify. There are low tech methods for remembering those fantastic ideas; I have a friend who swears by the notepad on the bedside . . . [more]

Congratulations to Lexis-Nexis Canada and a squadron of Canadian legal authors for achieving what many of us doubted that we would ever see, a contemporary Canadian legal encyclopaedia. Halsbury’s Laws of Canada has reached its seventy-seventh volume as a statement of common-law Canadian law in English.

Lexis took over the ground floor bar at Toronto’s Trump Hotel and flew in from the sunny California campus of Pepperdine University, the grand old man of Canadian tort law, Allen Martin Linden. And of course a Butterworths author and latterly a Lexis-Nexis author.

While AML delivered the one-liners, Halsburys is testament to the . . . [more]

At New York Legal Tech this week, Thomson Reuters will unveil an interesting basket of software products for the legal market. While a lot of hard innovative work has gone into the products to be released at the start of February, the most notable feature is the elements that they share in common.

The most significant development was not the suite of products that were unveiled but the change in strategic direction that they embody. I’ve commented before on how Thomson Reuters acquisitions appear somewhat disjointed. But this was evidence that the central vision of products like Serengeti has . . . [more]

Statistics Canada launched a blog today called—what else?—StatCan Blog (Blogue de StatCan, en français). As the first post explains,

Like most endeavours at the agency, the blog’s topics will have a certain statistical gravitas: the Framework for Environment Statistics, the System of National Accounts, the Consumer Price Index Enhancement Initiative, the Survey of Financial Security, as well as some broader topics, such as the use of microdata or the new model for publishing data online.

The Chief Statistician believes in the importance of linking these sometimes arcane-sounding initiatives to people’s own backyards.

This is tangential to law, . . . [more]

As announced moments ago, CanLII is launching a collaboration with BG Communications, a Montreal -based translation agency, in order to ensure that certain important case reports delivered in one of the official languages only are made available in the other language. As CanLII President, Colin Lachance notes:

With over 2000 new decisions posted each week, it is not possible to translate everything. . . . However, the legal community has highlighted a number of decisions that warrant wider availability in the other official language.

The press release goes on to say:

Judgments selected for translation will be identified in

Twitter is a-buzz today with the announcement that Thomson Reuters is acquiring innovation darling of UK law, Practical Law Company.

According to the Thomson Reuters press release (Jan. 3, 2013):

Practical Law Company has more than 750 employees, with principal operations in London and New York, and will be part of the Legal business of Thomson Reuters. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approval and customary closing conditions, and is expected to close in the first quarter of 2013. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

PLC has been making an impact over the last couple of years in North . . . [more]