Overview Article About Open Access & Legal Scholarship in the Last Decade

There is a new article at Slaw.ca on open access legal research by Hannah Steeves:

"In 2011, the TALL Quarterly published a brief article authored by John Bolan, Public Services Librarian at the Bora Laskin Law Library (University of Toronto). The article addressed the burgeoning open access movement for scholarly literature generally, with a focus on the lack and lag of open access literature within the discipline of law and potential areas of growth in the field. Bolan wrote, 'As befits the field of law, there are, however, exceptions to the exceptions that are worth noting.' With more than 10 years since Bolan’s article was published, this post reviews the exceptions highlighted as potential areas of growth and summarises developments of open access legal literature in the Canadian context over the past decade."

Those areas include:

• the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII)
• repositories of law-related articles such as SSRN and bepress
• the rise of interdisciplinary legal scholarship
• access to justice initiatives

Steeves is an Instruction & Reference Librarian at the Sir James Dunn Law Library, Dalhousie University (Halifax, Nova Scotia).