Open Access Law Principles in the United States

Many legal periodicals, like law journals and law reviews, believe in a free and neutral access to legal scholarship and that legal scholarship should be available to the widest possible audience, regardless of wealth. The Open Access principles were articulated in the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge, and the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

The open access law principles are based, generally, in the following:

• The legal periodical will require from the Author no more than a reasonable, limited-term exclusive license for commercial publication. The law paper will not interfere at any time with the author’s freedom to make his or her work available under a license as free as the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.
• In the event of reprinting or republication (of any part) of the essay or article, the Author will always attribute first publication to the legal periodical, unless the legal periodical does not require this.
• Upon publication of the essay or article, the legal periodical will make available to the Author an electronic version of the edited work—such as the PDF or the word processing document of the published piece—with the expectation that this will be posted in an Open Access Repository.
• The paper will post a current copy of its publication agreement on its web site, and will ensure that its agreement complies with the Open Access Law Principles.

See Also

• Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing
• Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge
• Budapest Open Access Initiative
• Open Access Law Adopting Journals
• Open Access Law Author Pledge
• Open Access Law Authors
• Open Access Law Publication Agreement