OA to practitioner-oriented legal information

James G. Milles, Redefining Open Access for the Legal Information Market, Law Library Journal, Fall 2006.

Abstract:   Professor Milles argues that the open access movement in legal scholarship fails to address --and in fact diverts resources from-- the real problem facing law libraries today: the soaring costs of nonscholarly, commercially published, practitioner-oriented legal publications. He suggests that one solution to this problem is for law schools to redirect some of their resources --intellectual capital, reputation, and student labor-- to publishing legal information for practitioners rather than legal scholars.

Comment.  OA would benefit legal practitioners as well as legal scholars, and there are more legal practitioners than legal scholars.  Hence, OA initiatives for legal scholarship are addressing one problem rather than another, and may be addressing a smaller problem rather than a larger one.  But I see no reason to say that OA for practitioners is "the real problem", when OA for scholars is another real problem.  We should be able to recognize plural problems and encourage parallel processing to attack them all.  Moreover, there are good reasons to start with legal scholarship, since its authors willingly (even eagerly) publish it without expecting to be paid.  The kind of practitioner-oriented publications Milles is concerned about tend to pay royalties, which makes them higher-hanging fruit for the OA movement.  I applaud attempts to pluck that fruit.  But at the same time I want to give priority to OA for royalty-free rather than royalty-producing literature.