Open Access Law Author Pledge in the United States

For authors wishing to commit publicly to open access ideals, the Open Access Law Project (OAL) established an OAL Author Pledge. This pledge commited authors to only publish law review articles in law reviews and journals that adhere to a minimum OAL commitment. The Project probed successful among legal periodicals, at least in the United States.

Those authors of legal scholarship believe that the scholarship should be available to the widest possible audience, regardless of wealth, and that legal periodicals should subscribe to Open Access principles, as articulated in the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge, and the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

They also believe that the ethics of a legal scholar include supporting Open Access principles to ensure free and neutral access to legal scholarship.

Therefore, they pledge to encourage the adoption of Open Access principles in legal papers. This means that:

• When the authors have editorial control over a law publication, they will adopt Open Access principles as part of editorial policy.
• When the authors act as an advisor to a legal periodical, they will encourage the editors to adopt Open Access principles as part of editorial policy.
• When the authors act as authors contributing to a legal periodical, they contribute only to journals that adhere to Open Access principles, by offering an author at least the freedoms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

Law Scholars which adopted the OAL Author Pledge

The following law Professors adopted the Open Access Law Author Pledge:

• James Boyle
• Deborah J. Cantrell
• Andres Guadamuz
• Dan Hunter
• Mark Lemley
• Lawrence Lessig
• Margaret Jane Radin

See Also

• Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing
• Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge
• Budapest Open Access Initiative
• Open Access Law Principles
• Open Access Law Adopting Journals
• The Open Access Law Project