Open Access News

... The open-access-to-law community (particularly in the US) has had trouble with [funding]. There are a variety of solutions, few if any complete in themselves. Most open-access providers originally depended — as we have — on grant funding, and on extensive support from a parent institution or a consortium. Most have added consulting income to the mix. And many get income from commercial partnerships, often based on the sale of back-end bulk data services. The most stable model is CanLII’s, which is financed by a head tax on Canadian lawyers. An excellent paper by Graham Greenleaf (abstract, slides), offered at the recent Law via the Internet conference in Florence, describes one prominent free-access provider’s experience in keeping the doors open.

In any case, open access to law presents some unusual sustainability problems. ...

First, open-access providers don’t really do research, in the sense of either basic science, or quantitative social science, or any of the things funded by research-oriented outfits like the NSF. We can sometimes make a plausible case for ourselves as testbeds or helpers on grants that go to others (as the LII has with its participation in the CeRI project).

Second, we are continually faced with rising costs of innovation. The new legal information products and services we imagine, and hope to build, are significantly more expensive to produce than the things we imagined when we began 16 years ago. This is partly the result of the Web’s technical evolution and partly the result of more sophisticated needs and wants ...

Like other not-for-profit projects, we have more trouble finding operating money than we do finding startup funds. ... This is a particular problem with legislation, which requires frequent updating. It also distinguishes legislation and regulations from scholarly publishing, and from many open-access repositories, which (like judicial opinions) gather material that is relatively static once mounted.

Some deep-rooted reluctance surrounds the funding of legal information, perhaps based on the idea that free legal information is just lawyer subsidy, or only answers the information problems of the rich (as Dan Dabney once put it). ...

Open-access providers could do more than they have to dispel this distrust. For the most part, we’ve made the case for open access in highfalutin’ normative terms ... We are now starting to see some work on evaluation of open access in much more hardheaded terms — how does it contribute to lawyer competence, support economic development, level the playing field between one-shot litigants and repeat players? These are important questions that will, if we are able to answer them rigorously, provide us with a strong case for support.

And then there is the “Tweed Ring” challenge — illustrated handsomely by this Thomas Nast cartoon. Everybody thinks that free legal information is the next guy’s problem. ...

Nobody thinks that free legal information is a bad thing, or unworthy. It’s just not at the top of anyone’s list. ...

This circle may break soon. Government transparency-by-web will no doubt get a lot of attention from the new administration; expectations among the “hack-the-gov” crowd are already very high, and there is good reason for this optimism. We are seeing what amount to open-access legal information projects of this kind demanded by assessments like the recent ABA committee report on e-rulemaking and realized in the efforts of people like the Sunlight Foundation (GovTrack.us is a good example). ...

At the LII, we are moving toward sustainable self-support; we’re not there yet. ...