Page:Crowdsourcing and Open Access.djvu/6

 publishing solves both problems by making current scholarship available worldwide at little expense. For that reason, faculty at several influential research institutions have voted to authorize archiving and distribution of their scholarship on open-access terms. Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences did so (by unanimous vote) early in 2008, and the Harvard Law School faculty unanimously followed suit a few months later. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology adopted a university-wide open access mandate in early 2009, and similar measures are pending or have been adopted by other universities. The adoption of open-access mandates by university faculty has led to the creation of institutional electronic repositories of scholarly works. Duke Law School’s faculty scholarship repository includes faculty papers dating back over half a century. Harvard’s new DASH repository may be unique in including student-authored papers alongside faculty scholarship. Nor is the push for scholarly open access confined to elite institutions: the Oklahoma City University School of Law, for example, maintains a repository of faculty scholarship extending back four decades. Cross-institutional repositories such as SSRN and BEPress hold even larger collections of faculty scholarship from universities worldwide.

Some law journals have also committed to publishing on an open-access model. The Science Commons organization (an affiliate