More on OA for law reviews

Susan Crawford has blogged some notes on Mike Carroll's talk at Cardozo Law School yesterday.  Mike is a law professor at Villanova Law School and a member of the board at Creative Commons.  Excerpt:

He began by reminding the students that the idea behind student-edited law reviews was (at least originally) the dissemination of legal knowledge.  The room was quiet -- they were all paying attention. 

He said that if the editors had a choice between increasing that dissemination (by, for example, making pdfs of articles available online) and making money for their schools (by, for example, reaping royalties from Westlaw and LEXIS, and getting paid for subscriptions), they should choose dissemination. 

But he also pointed out that that's probably a false choice -- Westlaw and LEXIS aren't going away any time soon, and there is an audience for hardcopy subscriptions that isn't going away either. 

Michael argued very persuasively that there are large audiences that don't have access to Westlaw and LEXIS but will find articles online and cite them:  researchers who bump into things online serendipitously, researchers from other disciplines, underfunded researchers, and researchers from other countries.  He urged the editors to make sure that the authors they publish have the rights to make their articles available online. 

Michael pointed the editors to Creative Commons's ScienceCommons project, which aims to widen open access to factual data.  He noted repeatedly that other disciplines are very far ahead of the legal academic field in their efforts to open access to information.  And he praised the Duke Law Journal for having a long history of putting articles online....

It was an inspiring talk.  I hope and expect that every student in the room took it to heart and will take its lessons home.  But I'm not sure that the current system of innumerable student-reviewed law journals is sustainable.