met in Durham, North Carolina at the Duke Law School. At that meeting, those directors drafted the "Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship." Since it was finalized and posted in February 2009, the Durham Statement has prompted discussion on dozens of blogs and listservs, and garnered over 60 online signatures from law librarians and other legal educators. It was the subject of a Law Librarian Blog Talk Radio Feed in February 2010; it has a Wikipedia entry. What is the Durham Statement? The Durham Statement calls for US law schools to stop publishing their journals in print format and to rely instead on electronic publication with a commitment to keep the electronic versions available in "stable, open, digital formats." It is posted on the web site of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The site includes background information on the Statement, a list of signatories and an FAQ. The Statement asks for two things: 1) open access publication 1 of law school-published journals; and 2) an end to print publication of law journals. Neither action is dependent on the other: law journals can be made freely accessible on the web and still be offered in print format to libraries and other subscribers; journals can also be offered only in fee-based electronic formats without print equivalents. Few if any to the Statement have objected to its call for open access publication of law journals. Although few law journals are registered with either the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) or the Science Commons Open Access Law Program, an increasing number of US law reviews post at least their current issues in freely accessible PDF and (in some cases) HTML formats on their journal web site, despite the possibility that the postings will affect * Prepared by Richard A.

Histories of law publishing in the United States can be found in a number of sources, several of which are listed in the bibliography that accompanies this article. Although there are no completely up-to-date treatments of the subject, the most comprehensive is probably Erwin C. Surrency'sA History of American Law Publishing(1990). Surrency discusses American legal publishing from the colonial era to the late twentieth century, but his book closes before the far-reaching changes resulting from the growth of electronic publishing and dissemination of legal information in the latter years of the twentieth century. A few sources discuss the initial impacts and implications of computer-assisted legal research databases. More recent literature on the Internet's effects on legal research is discussed in section IV of this article. Other useful sources for exploring the history of U.S. law book publishing are found in two edited collections: George S. Grossman'sLegal Research: Historical Foundations of the Electronic Age(1994); and Betty Taylor and Robert Munro's four volume set:American Law Publishing 1860-1900: Historical Readings(1984).

An increasing number of U.S. law journals post at least current issues in freely accessible PDF and (in some cases) HTML formats on their web sites. Yet, perhaps without exception, the journals that make their articles freely available on their websites also continue to publish print issues in the face of declining subscription numbers, and law libraries" growing disinterest in collecting and preserving journals in print. As universities reduce staff, freeze open positions, eliminate salary increases, and cut library budgets, why have law schools continued to subsidize print publication of journals that are accessible in electronic formats? Among the reasons suggested for this is the possible impact of electronic-only publishing on a journal"s reputation and ability to attract authors. This paper reports on the results of a survey of law journal authors" attitudes toward electronic-only law journals.

This article discusses the responsibilities of legal scholars to make their published works openly accessible through the Internet, within the context of efforts to increase free and open access to legal information, and to improve access to scholarly literature in other disciplines. The article also considers the roles and responsibilities of the institutions that support the creation and communication of legal scholarship for improving access to legal information.

This article examines the potential effects of the developing user-centered, networked information environment on scholarly communication in law. By “user-centered, networked information environment,” I mean the emerging environment for legal research and scholarship, in which most seekers and users of legal information will have ready desktop access to a networked computer and to applications that will allow them to communicate with colleagues around the world and enable them to retrieve increasing amounts of the information they need to be productive directly via the Internet, without needing to rely on locally held print sources.