Open Access, Free Access to Law and Access to Canadian Legal Scholarship (Part 2) – Slaw
peter.suber's bookmarks 2014-02-20
Summary:
"There is an overwhelming public good and social benefit to be obtained from open access publishing. The principle that the results of research that has been publicly funded should be freely accessible in the public domain is itself a compelling one, and fundamentally unanswerable. Arguments in support of mandatory open access publishing are even more compelling when the university is a public one and the researcher’s salary is supported by public funds. The US National Institutes of Health require scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that result from NIH-funded research to PubMed Central, the NIH’s publicly-funded digital library within the US National Library of Medicine. Unfortunately, the public research funding agencies in Canada – the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) – though well-intentioned, are non-committal about open access.
Open access is also public access.
The concept of free access to law is well established in Canada. CanLII (the Canadian Legal Information Institute) is recognized as a world leader in providing free access to Canadian law. Our governments, legislative bodies and courts have shown leadership in minimizing the constraints of Crown copyright (for American readers, this means putting materials in the public domain) and providing access to comprehensive collections of public legal resources on well-designed websites. But who is providing access to Canadian legal scholarship? ..."