Open Access News

It seems to me that we are coming close to the point where legal academics will begin to discuss the question whether there is a professional obligation to publish only in open-access venues.  Although there may be room for reasonable dissent, I should think that almost all scholars can agree that scholarship should be available to all students and scholars throughout the world at the lowest-possible cost.  The open-access imperative can be grounded on at least three ideas: (1) the idea that scholarship and the emergence of truth is an intrinsic telic good--an end worth pursuing for its own sake; (2) the idea that the creations of new ideas (a special form of information) is a public good in the economist's sense (because ideas have external social benefits and ideas cannot be rationed through price mechanisms); and (3) the idea that the fundamental moral equality of persons supports the maximization of access on reasonable terms of all persons to the realm of scholarly ideas.

We are currently in a period of transition....I believe that the benefits of open access are so compelling that in the long run, some form of open access will be nearly universal--although I am more confident that this will be true of serials publication than of monograph publication....

During this period of transition, scholars as individuals and scholarly institutions as collectives can determine whether the transition is a very long one or a relatively short one.  Faculties can encourage affiliated journals (e.g. law reviews) to adopt open access policies.  Individual scholars can publish in open access venues.

One particular way in which the transition can be facilitated is the development of an "open access" norm.  Such norms are likely to emerge in particular disciplines first and then spread across disciplines and within academic institutions.  In particular, legal academics (who have special "early awareness" of the issue) can begin to foster a professional norm against publication in closed-access, proprietary rights venues.  Various technologies of norm building are available.  One is public discussion and debate.  Another would be the creation of a public vehicle for pledging or vowing to publish in open-access venues whenever that is possible.  A third technique would be to engage in polite but pointed criticism of closed-access venues and those who publish in these venues.

Also see Mike Madison's blogged response to Solum:

Larry is right, but I think that there’s more to the story. Scholars aren’t going to give up the reputational benefits of publishing for prestige. An open access norm isn’t likely to stabilize, at least in law, unless both journal editors and authors somehow incorporate the prestige economy into the open publishing economy.

That’s not necessarily a Herculean task. Faculty know it. Students get it. At Pitt, I talked the other day with the current Editor in Chief, who reported to me that the number one topic of discussion for his board is how to improve the law review’s citation rank. How do you do that? Get the content out there. Allow authors to post to SSRN and BePress (which the law review does), and put its content on the Web in a timely way (which the law review knows that it needs to do).