Page:Crowdsourcing and Open Access.djvu/14

 * The goal of making court records more accessible is shared by RECAP, a software extension that permits users to “liberate” records from the federal judiciary’s fee-based PACER service and make them available for free on the Internet Archive. The movement to make primary legal source materials freely accessible experienced what may one day prove to have been a transformative moment on November 17, 2009, when search-engine giant Google announced that it had made several recent decades’ worth of state and federal appellate, district, tax, and bankruptcy court decisions available for searching via its Google Scholar portal. The site includes a rudimentary citator (accessible by clicking the “How cited” tab from each page) that usefully includes citations to secondary sources, such as articles and treatises online at Google Books. Moreover, by harnessing the market-tested Google search engine, the addition of case law instantly made Google Scholar a “player” in the burgeoning market of alternatives to the traditional proprietary legal database publishers. Google’s entry into the open-access case law world has drawn enthusiastic reactions from open-content advocates, although the near-term effect may be simply that