Public Domain Day, which falls on January 1st, is intended to be a celebration of copyright expiration, a day when notable works enter the public domain. In 2014, Public Domain Day in Canada saw the writings of Robert Frost, W.E.B. Du Bois, C.S. Lewis, Sylvia Plath, and Aldous Huxley became public works, free for anyone to use and build upon. However, because of copyright extensions passed by the U.S. Congress, no published works entered the U.S. public domain in 2014, and nothing will until 2019.

Under the leadership of Richard Danner, Duke Law's senior associate dean for information services and Archibald C. and Frances Fulk Rufty Research Professor of Law, the Law School became the first in the country to make all the articles published in its law journals — including back issues — freely accessible online in 1998. In addition, unlike most other law reviews, Duke's journals explicitly allow 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.

Richard Danner discusses Open Access and the Durham Statement in regards to electronic publishing and best practices for open access at libraries.

Boyle, co-founder of Duke Law's Center for the Study of the Public Domain, is a leader in the open access movement: he was a founding director of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that provides licenses that let individual artists choose how to share their work freely; is a co-founder of Science Commons, which aims to expand the Creative Commons mission into the realm of scientific and technical data; and is a co-founder of ccLearn, which works to promote the development of open educational resources.