Kudos to Richard Danner: Taking the Next Step in Open Access at Duke Law

You will find Dick Danner's signature on the Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship. Now he and Duke's School of Law have taken the next step in providing open access at Duke Law. Duke has launched the Duke Law Scholarship Repository. The repository is a joint project of the J. Michael Goodson Law Library and the Law School’s Academic Technologies and Communications departments in partnership with BePress' Digital Commons.

Of course Danner has been a pioneer in Internet distribution of legal scholarship. Under his leadership Duke became the first U.S. law school to make all the articles published in its law journals — including back issues — freely accessible online in 1998. Duke's journals also allowed authors to post articles published in the journals without restriction on freely-accessible third party web sites, as well as on Internet sites under their own control. In 2005, Duke Law furthered its commitment to open access by establishing an online archive of faculty scholarship, providing free access to the majority of articles published by Duke Law faculty. The contents of that archive are now the foundation of the Duke Law Scholarship Repository.

The Duke Law Scholarship Repository ultimately will include the text of lectures delivered at Duke Law, webcasts from scholarly presentations and conferences, publications of Duke Law's research centers, Duke Law student works, and more according to the press release. Here's a snip:

Danner is widely recognized for pioneering the use of the Internet to make legal scholarship available to all. His efforts, he says, are inspired in part by the work of the Law School's intellectual property faculty as well as his own strongly held belief that law schools have a moral obligation to share the information and ideas that sustain legal systems and democratic ideals.

"Open access makes it possible for the scientist, the lawyer in some underdeveloped part of the world without resources, to begin participating in the intellectual dialogue," Danner says. "I do believe there is a moral obligation to disseminate knowledge as widely as possible."

Advancing the Open Access Movement in the Legal Academy. Need a "proof of concept" demonstration to promote open access at your law school? Follow Duke's example. Need an argument to advance the open access cause? See Richard A. Danner, Applying the Access Principle in Law: The Responsibilities of the Legal Scholar, 35 International Journal of Legal Information 355 (2007). Just maybe it will shame law profs opposed to law school digital repositories because of their potential negative impact on SSRN download counts into realizing that there is something a wee bit more important than ego gratification. Remember folks, download counts are nothing more than a marketing tool used by SSRN .It's a brilliant one but mouse clicks have no infometric value. [JH]