It is a happy coincidence that Open Access Week coincides with my inaugural post on the new CALI Spotlight blog. I am a HUGE fan of Open Access – and all of the Opens, really…Open Source, Open Education, Open Data, Open Law, etc. So much so that CALI’s commitment to the Opens with its tools and products was a major reason that I leapt at the chance to work here.
What is Open Access (or OA)? To quote trusty old Wikipedia, it’s “unrestricted access via the Internet to articles published in scholarly journals, and also increasingly to book chapters or monographs.” And I’m a librarian, so when I use the word “access,” I don’t just mean “free.” I also mean that there’s enough metadata attached and it’s stored in such a way that people can find it and that people a hundred years from now will be able to use it too.
I feel like OA doesn’t get as much traction in law as it does with other academic disciplines, which is crazy because if there was ever a discipline more ripe for OA than law, I haven’t seen it. First, there’s the primary data set for it which is… Continue reading
