The Open Access Movement
By Olivier Charbonneau, Associate Librarian, Concordia University (Montréal, Canada)
Table of contents
Table of contents	i
About the author	i
Thanks	ii
Setting the Stage for Open Access	1
Intellectual Freedom and Open Access	2
Theoretical Insights Around OA	3
Private Relationships within Public Law	3
The Economics of “Zero”	4
Of Gifts, Prestige and Commons Management	6
Making it all Work	7
Scholarly communication	7
Other cases of OA	9
Free/Libre and Open Source Software	9
Open Content and the public domain	9
Open government	10
Free Access to Law	10
Conclusion	11
Bibliography	12

About the author
As an Associate Librarian at Concordia University, Olivier Charbonneau is primarily interested in copyright issues as well as questions of open access and social media (Web 2.0). He is a doctoral student at the Faculté de droit, Université de Montréal. He has over 15 years of professional involvement in library and cultural communities. He holds two masters degrees from Université de Montréal, one in information sciences and another in law, as well as an undergraduate degree in commerce from McGill University. He has kept a research blog since 2005 in French at www.culturelibre.ca and a work blog since 2011 in English at OutFind.ca. All his publications are available via Spectrum, Concordia University’s institutional repository: http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/view/creators/Charbonneau=3AOlivier=3A=3A.html Olivier can be reached at o.charbonneau@concordia.ca 
Thanks
The author would like to thank his employer, Concordia University Libraries (http://library.concordia.ca/) for the time granted to work on this paper.

Setting the Stage for Open Access
For many of us, the Internet now seems intertwined with our daily lives. Despite this, the emergence of a global interconnected digital network still rumbles the bedrock of many communities. It impacts how we interact with each other, as well as how we access and use documents and information (Ryan 2010). It also opens the door for new ways of thinking about these interactions, which, in many cases, imply paradigm shifts (Kuhn 1972). One such paradigm shift is open access.
According to Suber, open access involves documents or information that are “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions” (2012, p. 4). As we will see in a moment, open access is often associated with the scholarly communication processes but, as Elkin-Koren and Salzberger judiciously point out:
“There is no strict definition of open access, or open content, and the term is often used to describe a wide range of activities with different strategies, goals and ideological commitments. Some initiatives focus on availability, promoting free and unrestricted access to all kinds of content, such as open access journals (e.g. BioMed, Public Library of Science (PLoS)) and courseware (e.g. MIT Open Courseware project). Other initiatives emphasize freedom to use copyrighted materials, and especially to modify, remix and tinker with pre-existing materials. The conviction shared by many open content initiatives is that the online environment facilitates new ways of sharing and collaborating in the production of creative works, and that copyright law in its current form creates an obstacle to exercise these new opportunities.” (2012, p. 154)
It is important to understand that open access is a way to make materials available in digital environments, which was not afforded to us in such a direct manner before the advent of a global interconnected network. It involves a particular approach, that of openness, which also has ramifications in many domains.
In that sense, our goal with this paper is to provide sufficient insight into open access so that our readers may engage on the topic from an intellectual freedom perspective. That is why we will begin by exploring the relationship between these two topics. Then, we will succinctly present the theoretical issues related to open access, following Lessig’s regulatory Framework (1999, p.81). This framework provides for a structured analytical approach, dividing a complex digital issue in four themes: law, markets (or economics), norms and technology. 
Afterwards, we will delve into more practical cases. The first one involves scholarly communication or, broadly speaking, publication of peer-reviewed scientific literature that originate from academic research projects. This first case is given more weight in this paper as it has generated much discussion. In fact, many confound this topic and open access, although it is applied to a myriad of other issues. 
Then, we will succinctly present a range of other cases where open access is seen as a viable solution or where advocates are pushing for it: free/libre open source software; open content and the public domain; open government; and free access to law. For each of these cases, we will highlight distinguishing features in order to orient the reader to more detailed information. 
On the subject of terminology, we use the term “information” in a generic manner, which includes data, knowledge, information, culture or wisdom and the myriad products and documents that contain them, in digital (e.g.: electronic files) or physical (i.e.: books, CDs, vinyl records, etc.) form. Please excuse this shorthand. 
One last point about epistemology, we borrow broadly from social systems theory as posited by Luhmann (1993; 1995; 2000; 2004), whereby agents in a social system interact through formal or informal communications, the sum of which form distinct sub-systems within their environments. Complexity arises when parameters or new factors influence impact how communications occurred – leading to systemic change. 
Intellectual Freedom and Open Access
There is a clear consensus in the literature that intellectual freedom is directly linked with freedom of expression, the press and to access and use information and that it is a core value of librarianship. Gorman famously stated that
 “In the United-States, [intellectual freedom] is constitutionally protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution, which states, in part, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging freedom of speech, or of the press.” There is, of course, no such thing as an absolute freedom outside the pages of fiction and utopian writings, and, for that reason, intellectual freedom is constrained by law in every jurisdiction.” (2000, p. 88)
Gorman continues to state that rarely are proponents “for” or “against” intellectual freedom, but they articulate their views in absolute or relative terms. On these issues, Hauptman (2002 p. 16-29) as well as and McMenemy, Poulter and Burton (2007) offer additional evidence and insight. The link between intellectual freedom and censorship is obvious.
Intellectual freedom is also linked with Article 19 of the United Nation’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” (1948)
Samek (2007, p. 9-11) provides an account of how various groups, such as United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) have further articulated the concept of intellectual freedom in various initiatives and declarations.
Barendt offers an interesting distinction between academic freedom, a well-known right professors enjoy in universities, and intellectual freedom:
“[a]cademic freedom is not identical to intellectual freedom or to freedom of the mind. Intellectual freedom is a right to which we are all entitled, wherever we work. Like freedom of speech or expression, it is a general right belonging to all citizens.” (2010, p. 38)
In discussing how intellectual freedom and freedom of expression are intertwined, Krug further articulates, in light of librarianship, that:
“all people have the right to hold any belief or idea on any subject and to express those beliefs or ideas in whatever form they consider appropriate. The ability to express an idea or a belief is meaningless, however, unless there is an equal commitment to the right of unrestricted access to information and ideas regardless of the communication medium. Intellectual freedom, then, is the right to express one’s ideas and the right of others to be able to read, hear or view them.” (2006, p. 394-5)
From these points, we can draw a common thread for intellectual freedom, namely that it is universal in enshrining our right to access and use information. In light of this, intellectual freedom intersects or overlaps with open access in that the former is promoted as a way to maximize or optimize access and use of digital documents and information while the latter expresses a fundamental right of the same vein. 
If open access and intellectual freedom are linked through their desired outcomes, that of increased access and use, they truly overlap when there is a clear case where an agent or an institution has a clear role in making the information they produce available under open access. That is to say, the imperative to make information available under open access 
This link is implied in the literature, but more analysis of the relationship between these two concepts would undoubtedly be welcome.
Theoretical Insights Around OA
In order to dissect open access in more manageable bites, we will apply Lessig’s regulatory Framework (1999, p. 81). This framework provides for a structured analytical approach, dividing a complex digital issue in four themes: law, markets (or economics), norm and technology. 
For law, we must first consider how public law and private ordering interact, namely through copyright and its interaction with freedom of expression. As for markets or economics, we will explore the rather revolutionary issue of “free” or “zero price” afforded to us by digital technologies. Then, gift giving and prestige provide insight to the norms of open access systems. And, we will explore how technology has shifted to open access in the past decades. 
Private Relationships within Public Law
An important distinction must be made between the regimes established by public laws and the private relationships that are derived from them. Too often are these two confounded when analyzing how social systems interact with legal issues. In fact, agents in a social system interact according to rules established by law, but how they interact is rather a function of power asymmetries, such as access to capital. This is essential to understanding how open access is being brought forward in line with copyright. 
Copyright establishes a general legal regime empowering a right-holder to forbid specific uses of qualifying information goods – generally referred to as “protected works” by jurists. In turn, one has two options if you wish to use a protected work in a way that constitutes a reserved right: (1) seek permission from a right-holder (which may not necessarily be the original creator); or (2) qualify for a limitation (such as through a collective licensing agency) or exception (such as fair use/dealings or other specific exceptions) to copyright, which depends directly on your jurisdiction (i.e. which country in the world you are in and that national Copyright Act). If you cannot, you must refrain using the work or face reprimand. This general canvas explains how radio stations can play music; movie theatres show films; and how schools and universities can make copies of published works for students. 
Now, the original goal of providing a “right to forbid” using protected works was to establish artificial scarcity around a work to allow markets to flourish. Many have raised significant issues with how this may limit the right to freedom of expression internationally (Griffiths and Suthersanen 2005; Strowel and Tulkens 2006) and within the United-States (Nimmer 1969; Goldstein 1970; Litman 1986, 2006; Netanel 2001, 2008). Much can be said about how overzealous large corporations with a treasure trove filled with protected works muscle others to silence but this is not where our story is going. 
Rather, open access focuses on cases where agents have an incentive (or should have an incentive) to allow others to use protected works. This is mainly achieved through contractual means, which fit completely within the logic of copyright (Lessig 1999, 2001, 2005, 2006, 2008). Contracts, also called licenses (Ellen 2009) when they cover non-exclusive rights, are a mechanism whereby a right-holder may authorize the use of a protected work in a way reserved by copyright. 
In that sense, licensing schemes associated with open access, such as Creative Commons or the General Public licenses, are a twist of classic copyright because they constitute pre-authorizations for using a work (as opposed to asking for permission, you are allowed in advance) in specific cases. These licenses reflect the power of copyright permissions granted by contractual means, channeled to empower a community of creators to share, remix and use protected works.
Copyright establishes the general rules around using protected works. In it of itself, it is a means to an end, and can be wielded both to allow and forbid uses. The open access movement is using this tool to foster a system of pre-authorized uses, illustrating a fascinating case of judicious application of its principles to the digital environment.
The Economics of “Zero”
The economics of information goods are a fascinating and emerging field, particularly since the emergence digital technology (Varian, Farrell and Shapiro 2004). Not only do information goods expose a strange sequence of characteristics, they also test our assumptions of market dynamics (McKenzie 2003; Brousseau and Curien 2007).
Economic literature distinguishes between two types of goods: private goods and public goods. Economists use two concepts to distinguish them: rivalrousness and excludability. The case of private goods is easy to understand, as they are classic consumable goods. They generally respond to market dynamics of supply and demand, such as: an apple; a single copy of a paper book; a meal in a restaurant; etc. Private goods are rival in the same way that eating an apple means there is one less apple in the market and excludable because if the apple I own is in my lunch bag, I can exclude you from it (and society will back me up on my ownership claim if it is legitimate).
Public goods are rather of a different breed, as they tend to have completely different consumption patterns. Take air, for example. It is difficult to say who owns it, if you consume air by breathing, it is hard to exclude others from doing so at the same time and your breathing of air does not deplete the total supply or air (on a global scale at least). As such, economists say that public goods are nonrival and nonexcludable. 
More and more, digital information goods (without encryption) are seen as public goods in the economic sense (actually, so did the ideas behind physical information goods). For example, each copy of a non-encrypted PDF document on a government website is identical to the previous (nonrival) and can be copied at will (nonexcludable). Barring network congestion, it is easy to understand how digital documents on the Internet behave, in the economic sense, in the same manner as air (of course, you may say that accessing the Internet is not free and there may be network congestion in some cases – but this simplified example illustrates my point). 
In that sense, open access can be construed as a way to maximize the aggregate social value of information goods. The more people share or participate in an information good, the more valuable it becomes for society. Shaprio and Varian present these issues from the perspective of network effects: 
 “There is a central difference between the old and the new economies: the old industrial economy is driven by economies of scale; the new information economy is driven by the economics of networks. [...] Whether real or virtual, networks have a fundamental economic characteristic: the value of connecting to a network depends on the number of other people already connected to it.” (1999, p. 173-4)
In fact, digital technologies have decreased the costs of participating in digital environments. Anderson summarizes how the digital environment changes the economics of information goods:
 “The democratized tools of production are leading to a huge increase in the number of producers. Hyperefficient digital economics are leading to new markets and marketplaces. And finally, the ability to tap the distributed intelligence of millions of consumers to match people with the stuff that suits them best is leading to the rise of all sorts of new recommendation and marketing methods, essentially serving as the new tastemakers.” (2006, p. 57)
This has lead to a new category of information good: those produced socially. Benkler introduces an important point about the collaborative endeavor inherent to digital environments: 
“Because social sharing requires less precise specification of the transactional details with each transaction, it has a distinct advantage over market-based mechanisms for reallocating the excess capacity of shareable goods, particularly when they have small quanta of excess capacity relative to the amount necessary to achieve the desired outcome. [...] If excess capacity in a society is very widely distributed in small dollops, and for any given use of the excess capacity it is necessary to pool the excess capacity of thousands or even millions of individual users, the transaction-cost advantages of the sharing system become significant.” (2006, p. 114-5)
At this point, the astute reader will have understood the importance of copyright laws in economics of information goods. Because copyright forbids what technology allows, the economic nature of information goods changes from a public good to a private good. Said differently, the “right to forbid” granted to the right-holder by copyright creates artificial scarcity and a quasi-monopoly around the protected work (by the way, not all information goods are protectable by copyright). In that sense, the field of the economic analysis of law as applied to copyright and digital environments is rich (Frischmann 2012; Elkin-Koren and Salzberger 2012, 2004; Elkin-Koren, Netanel and Baker 2002).
Of Gifts, Prestige and Commons Management
Now that we have examined the legal and economic ramifications of open access, the question of “why?” begs itself. Why would creators elect to “give away” their content mostly for free on the Internet? What norms would dictate such a behavior in their communities? 
Benkler (2005, p. 183) provides a partial answer in his discussion about perceived rewards of contributors of open access content, which he links to gift giving and alternative resource sharing networks. He posits that there are three main motivators for individuals to participate: monetary rewards; intrinsic hedonic rewards; and social-psychological rewards. 
Firstly, one may give away their intellectual property because doing so will allow them to profit down the line. This is the case for contributing to open source software projects, as one may obtain consulting contracts down the line, which may be much more lucrative than the small contribution of code to the overall software project. Secondly, some people derive intrinsic motivation from doing good deeds, hence the hedonistic rewards. Finally, social-psychological rewards stem from the prestige one can obtain from the community that produces the social good, for example by being recognized as an expert on a subject by your peers. Understanding how these three factors interact to motivate individuals in participating in peer-production systems will yield a better understanding of the norms that motivate a group.
Ostrom devised another approach through her analysis of how commons are managed outside of market mechanisms (Olstom 1990, 90-120). This framework highlights that the “tragedy of the commons” (Hardin 1968) can be averted if communities can manage to adhere to certain principles to guide their action. This model was recently applied to “knowledge commons” through the Institutional Analysis and Development framework or IAD (Ostrom and Hess 2007, p. 41-81), which aims to analyze commonly managed resources. 
First, the parameters of a case are described based on the biophysical characteristics of the resources used in common; the attributes of the community; and the rules in use. Then, action situations identify the salient processes as applied by the relevant actors – this constitutes the “Action Area” of the model, which yields patterns of interaction. Finally, evaluation criteria and outcomes provide feedback to all parts of the model. The IAD provides for another model to understand norms and parameters within a community that guide their collective actions.
Making it all Work
Digital technologies are at the forefront of open access. A loosely managed network of networks, where nodes can be added easily and at low cost as per the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Model (ISO/IEC 7498-1), provides for a flexible topography. Combined with inexpensive tools to create, edit and manage digital content, this topography provides for a fertile ground to sow the seeds of information. 
The OSI Model is an important building block to understand: it is through open standards that a silent horde has coordinated the immense effort of cooperating to create the Internet. Each individual agent could interface with the broader network if they respected the basic rules with each application they added to the system. It also allowed small, simple projects to mushroom up to a global scale. When open standards are designed into a system, other agents can piggy-back on the value generated by each new user or information added to the system. Someone’s free-riding becomes a vector for increased value for every member of the community.
A great example of this process is the free/libre open source software (FLOSS) movement, which will be covered in a separate section below.
Tim O’Reilly (2005) famously proposed the phrase “Web 2.0” to describe this phenomenon, also known now as social media. To describe the potential of these new technologies, Coombs has identified six pillars that underpin them:
“1. Radical decentralization 
2. Small pieces loosely joined 
3. Perpetual beta 
4. Remixable content 
5. User as contributor 
6. Rich user experience” (Coombs, 2007)
These pillars – or philosophies – illustrates why social media have become so popular so quickly, namely through the network effect described above. Not all open access initiatives exhibit all of these factors, but the technological potential is there to innovate and shake the foundations of existing social processes. The next few sections present cases where communities have undertaken open access movements.
Scholarly communication
As famously posited by Harold J. Coolidge, a researcher’s imperative is to publish or perish. This has given rise to the scholarly communication process, whereby submitted papers are peer-reviewed for quality and published in academic journals. Before digital technologies, this process was achieved through print dissemination. Researchers would give away the copyright to their papers to commercial publishers, who would organize the peer-review and printing processes, so that, in turn, university libraries would subscribe to them to provide access to scientific knowledge.
The problem arose when publishers saw an opportunity to deploy their business online, namely to leverage the intellectual assets given to them by researchers on the backs of university libraries, who are locked-in to subscribing to their journals. As Willinsky put it: 
“Bodies of knowledge that would advance human understanding and benefit humankind seem so clearly a public good that it might well be hard for someone who is not part of the current system of scholarly publishing to understand why the research and scholarship literature is not being made as open as possible. One might argue that the print economy of journal publishing was once as open and far-reaching as is economically possible. Had journal prices not skyrocketed over the last few decades, it is possible that the idea of creating open access would not have taken the form that it has, or at least the idea would not have the force and urgency that it has now assumed.” (2006, p. 36-7)
Studies abound of the skyrocketing cost of journal subscriptions in academic library (Association for Research Libraries 2004; Jacobs 2006; Suber 2012, p. 181) and are mostly cited as the main imperative of open access to scholarly communications. 
In understanding the scope of open access to scholarly communications, some focus on the academic article submitted for peer-review, the workhorse of the research process, while others also include raw data generated by experiments as items to be made available in open access. In any case, open access is generally seen as both an alternative and a complement to the classic publication process. 
Authors have the option of either choosing a fully open-access peer-reviewed journal (see the Directory of Open Access Journals at doaj.org), which is considered “gold” open access; either publishing in classic journals (also called toll-access or subscription journals) as well as self-archiving their papers in open archives or institutional repositories, which is considered the “green” option. Most toll-access journals allow for the latter option and a summary of their self-archiving policies can be found on the SHERPA/RoMEO project page (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/). 
The open access journal “gold” option and the self-archiving “green” option were laid out in the Budapest Open Access Initiative statement (Open Society Foundation 2002) and the Berlin Declaration (Max Planck Society 2003). The latter is presented as something to foster while the latter as more of an imperative. Then, the Bethesda Statement (Suber 2003) provides guidance for institutions (universities) and grant-giving organizations on how to incorporate open access principles in their policies. It introduces a further distinction between “gratis” and “libre” open access. The former provides to access at no cost to the reader but still imposes copyright restrictions. The latter provides access that is free of charge and under a permissive license such as Creative Commons. 
An important advocate for open access is the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition of the Association for Research Libraries. It provides for many publications and guides to open access, such as alternate business models or model policies for universities (SPARC 2012). Another advocate for open access is UNESCO, which recently published a guide on developing open access policies for government and institutions (Swan 2012).
A final comment should be made on how institutions are implementing open access to scholarly communications. Some have voiced concerns that open access mandated from universities or grant-giving organizations are an impediment to academic freedom as they constrain the author of a scholarly communication to disseminate their creations in a particular way. Although these issues are very important, Suber points out that
“Academic authors remain free to submit their work to the journals or publishers of their choice. Policies requiring [open access] do so conditionally, for example, for researchers who choose to apply for a certain kind of grant. In addition, these policies generally build in exceptions, waver options, or both. Since 2008 most university policies have been adopted by faculty deeply concerned to preserve and enhance their prerogatives.” (2012, p. 23)
The faculty autonomy argument is an important one to preserve academic (and, by extension, intellectual) freedom in scholarly communication. That is why so much attention is given to how institutions deploy their open access policies.
Other cases of OA
In this section, we briefly explore a few more cases where communities have been actively seeking open access to various types of resources. These are presented in no particular order.
Free/Libre and Open Source Software
Open source software is the original open access case. Software is created from code – computer code written by humans to operate computers. This code is then compiled or transformed into binary instructions that a computer’s processor can implement in a program. When one installs a program on a personal computer, they copy the program’s binary files to their computer. To modify a program, one needs to tinker with the source code, not the binary files. 
That is why most commercial software is proprietary – we obtain a license to use the binary file and its corresponding program as is, not the right to tinker with the source code. As Stallman (2002) or Raymond (2001) have famously pointed out, in the early days of computers, one would receive the source code and allowed to make local adjustments to ensure that the software would work properly. Proprietary software hinders our capacity to adapt the programs we use to our local needs. 
The Free versus libre distinction is in line with the gratis or libre issue in scholarly communication. Giving software away for free is one thing, liberating it from copyright restrictions is quite another. 
The autonomy argument is foundational for the open source software movement.
Open Content and the public domain
The issues and philosophies of the open source software movement have repercussions in other areas, such as cultural production, social media and open educational resources. For example, Boyle (1996, 2008) explores how corporations attempt to enclose the public domain within their licensing businesses. Lessig (2006, 2005, 2001) proposes a structure by which we can share our cultural productions freely on the Internet. And Butcher, Kanwar and Uvalic-Trumbic (2011) envision a world where teachers and professors work together to create a global network of free online curricular documents for open education. All these are further examples of communities employing the open access principles 
Open government
The term “open government” refers to a series of initiatives to increase access and use of public sector information, data and documents. It has gained broad acceptance within official governmental circles following a White House memorandum mandating United-States agencies to follow its precepts (Orszag 2009) as well as an international declaration of principles aimed at governments (Open Government Partnership, 2011).  
Open government has drawn insight from many laws, policy instruments and institutions. For example, the right to access government records and documents is guaranteed in many jurisdictions around the world by freedom of information (FOI) laws (Mendel 2008). Similarly, many countries have launched e-government policies to modernize government processes (United Nations 2012). As well, many institutions support open access of public sector information, such as UNESCO (Uhlir 2004) and the OECD (2007, 2009). In a sense, open government builds momentum from these initiatives while introducing new concepts and processes.
A dynamic understanding of open government may be required to fully apprehend all ramifications (Gavelin, Burall and Wilson 2009). In fact, Lathrop and Ruma link open government with the philosophy of open source software:
“The concept of open government has been influenced – for the better – by the open source movement, and taken on a greater focus for allowing participation in the procedures of government. Just as open source software allows users to change and contribute to the source code of their software, open government now means government where citizens not only have access to information, documents and proceedings, but can also become participants in a meaningful way. Open governments also means improved communication and operations within various branches and levels of government. More sharing internally can lead to greater efficiency and accountability.” (2010, xix)
These measures serve as a means of increasing accountability of government actions through transparency while involving citizens in the governance of the state through participation and collaboration. Similarly, open government implies a subtle argument about how the rhetoric of ownership inherent to copyright’s logic of permission seeking hinders the broad use and sharing of government information. 
Free Access to Law
“The Law” or legal information or primary legal materials generally refers to documents produced by competent legislatures and judiciary bodies within a jurisdiction, most notably court rulings as well as statutes and related documents. One would simply assume that these documents would constitute public record and therefore be freely available in digital format. Actually, securing open access to legal information is a much more complex endeavor primarily because of tradition (Martin 2006).
In the United-States, private publishers traditionally provided for the dissemination of primary legal documents. (Berring 2000) With the emergence of digital technologies, the industry consolidated around a few major players (Danner 2006). One of these publishers, West Publishing, sued Mead Data Center for copyright infringement of its pagination methodology, widely used by courts and lawyers at the time to write about the law. In 1986, the 8th Circuit Federal Appellate Court ruled in favor of West, effectively halting initiatives to provide open access to court cases (Berring 1997). This initiated the Neutral Citation movement (Martin 2006). 
In many other English-speaking countries around the globe (notably former British colonies), primary legal documents are covered by “crown copyright” or a copyright claim by the government, as is the case in Canada (Foote 1997). This direct claim of ownership, and subsequent licensing agreements with private publishers, has posed unique challenges to making these materials available on the Internet (Tjaden 2005).
In order to counter private or public claims of ownership, the Free Access to Law movement aims to foster the open access publishing of primary legal documents through Legal Information Institutes, which, according to the Montreal Declaration on Free Access to Law:
“- Publish via the internet public legal information originating from more than one public body;
- Provide free and anonymous public access to that information;
- Do not impede others from obtaining public legal information from its sources and publishing it; and
- Support the objectives set out in this Declaration.” (WorldLII 2007)
These various Legal Information Institutes are aggregated within WorldLII (Greenleaf, Chung and Mowbray 2005). In fact, open access to law is seen as a way to foster the rule of law, particularly for developing countries (Poulin 2004) where as many as 4 billion people do not have access to the rule of law (Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor 2008, p. 1).
Conclusion
Our goal was to present the many dimensions of open access, as it represents a paradigm shift for many communities and it warrants study from multiple angles. More importantly, open access fosters intellectual freedom as it facilitates access to information and, if the appropriate factors are present, fosters a sense of engagement and stewardship in different contexts. This does not happen in a vacuum, individuals and institutions must operate a conscious choice to adhere to its principles in order to realize its potential for their communities.
We have explored cases were communities or agents have a direct interest in considering open access as their preferred method for interacting between themselves as well as documentation and information. Hopefully, this increased access does not simply lead to more complexity, but is met with new institutions and ways of doing so that society can recoup the benefits of open access to more information.
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