PUBLISHED:October 15, 2010

Duke Law hosts workshop on open access to legal scholarship, Oct. 22

Duke Law School will host a daylong workshop on best practices for open access law journals on Friday, Oct. 22. The event, which coincides with national “Open Access Week,” will feature talks and an interactive roundtable with law journal editors and some of the leading thinkers about open access and legal publishing, including representatives from the law libraries and technology departments at Duke Law School, Harvard Law School, and William & Mary Law School.

The workshop, sponsored by Duke’s J. Michael Goodson Law Library and Center for the Study of the Public Domain, and the Harvard Law School Library, will address the ongoing discourse relating to The Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship, which calls for making law journal articles “available in stable, open, digital formats in place of print.”

Richard Danner, Duke Law's senior associate dean for information services and Rufty Research Professor of Law, was one of the 12 library directors from the country's top university law libraries who wrote and signed The Durham Statement in 2009.

“The workshop is designed to promote a discussion of open access issues, and to provide some fairly practical guidance to law review editors about issues in this digital era when, regardless of whether they continue to print or not, electronic publishing platforms, access, and preservation all need to be addressed,” Danner said.

Phil Rubin ’11, editor in chief of the Duke Law Journal says understanding online printing has become crucial for law journal editors. “I think everybody recognizes, deep down, that eventually the printing presses will stop, not because of some ideological view, but because it’s going to become the overwhelmingly sensible thing to do,” Rubin says. “The question everyone is asking is about timing and preparation. There is a lot of preparation for going solely online. You want to really understand online publishing. If that’s going to be the only way you present your journal, it has to be really good.”

Speakers include Danner and Harvard Law School’s open access librarian, Michelle Pearse.

The workshop will be webcast live and streamed live through Duke University's ustream channel and via Real (get a free Real Player here). During the conference, an interface will be available for remote sites to post questions to and comments for participants.