Page:Crowdsourcing and Open Access.djvu/16


 * researcher seeking to illuminate the sources and development of doctrine, the absence of sources antedating 1950 or thereabouts represents a potentially serious impediment.


 * Poor hyperlinking and citator functionality. Many open-access sites fail to take advantage of the improved capabilities that hypertext offers over publication of the exact same document in paper form. That is to say, although they reproduce the text of the courts’ opinions as published, they do nothing more than that: it is not possible to click and follow a citation that appears in the text of the court’s opinion and view the cited source, even if the other source is also online. Nor do most sites include any citator functionality whereby the opinion being displayed can be followed forward in time to locate references that cite it.


 * Authentication against official referents. Reading an opinion hosted on the official site of the issuing court sends a powerful message that the text is authentic. Reading the same opinion on the site of a large proprietary publisher sends perhaps a different message, but not one that would cause most users to question the fidelity of the reproduction. Reading the same opinion on an open-access site, however, may prompt uncertainty as to the provenance