Open Access Publishing and the Future of Legal Scholarship

Lewis and Clark Law School 2006 Spring Symposium

Friday March 10, 2006

Podcast of this event available from Lewis & Clark.

Scholarship and research reporting in the sciences and medicine has, in the last few years, been shifting to an open access approach. The combined power of the web, universal document formats (e.g., Adobe’s Portable Document Format), and powerful search technology (e.g., Google), has fueled a dramatic expansion in this open access approach in just the last four years. The result is that the global interested public can find and use scholarship at a far lower cost, to a far greater degree, than ever before. Interestingly, the open access publishing model has not yet become as popular in legal scholarship as in other fields. Why has legal scholarship lagged in the open access publishing movement? Should law schools, who do the most to fund both the production and publication of legal scholarship, push toward an open access publishing approach? The papers presented will be published, under open access principles, in the Lewis & Clark Law Review.

To learn more about Open Access visit Lewis and Clark's
web site on Open Access Legal Scholarship