More on OA for legal scholarship

Tim Armstrong, Open Access Law, or: Should Law Professors Write for Wikipedia? Info / Law, January 30, 2007.  Excerpt:

The nascent open access movement in legal scholarship attracted a good deal of attention last fall, including from the three of us — Bill's October roundup of recent law-blogger posts is still a good resource, and you can also find some pertinent stories through our open access and peer production tags. Legal scholars seem to be embracing open access publishing of scholarship, not only by posting their works on sites such as SSRN and BePress, but also by policing those sites' commitment to open access principles....

One of the things I liked about the class Derek and I co-taught last spring is that we were able to dispense entirely with a textbook and rely entirely on online readings, some of which were updated mere days before the class in which they would be taught. It lent an air of immediacy to the course content that I think was particularly appropriate in view of the au courant subject matter. The day of doing that routinely and easily in a law school setting may still be a ways off (although some bold cyberprofs have taken the plunge), but it's still an ambition of mine.

Comment.  I like the post but not the title, which incorrectly implies that providing OA to your own work means putting it in Wikipedia.  Yes, Wikipedia is OA, but it's not the only form of OA literature or even the primary form for the OA movement.  What's primary for the OA movement is OA to peer-reviewed literature, either through OA journals or OA repositories.