This article uses a social shaping of technology perspective, which studies the complex interactions between technology and the culture of a discipline, to investigate the evolution of legal scholarship in the digital age, and to determine how the open access movement has influenced various forms of legal scholarship, particularly law reviews, their online companions, and legal blogs....
[Paragraph 70] Both during the early days of the Internet, and now in the age of the open-access movement, a sociotechnical systems view explains the resiliency of law reviews, and the reasons why they have not been replaced with open-access journals or become open-access publications themselves. Instead, new technologies have resulted in open access-forums that have created a parallel system to law reviews. These new forums include the law reviews’ online “companions,” and online repositories such as SSRN’s Legal Scholarship Network and bepress’s Legal Repository....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/09/2009 11:01:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
