Ruth Bird

Open Access to Legal Information

Free Access to Law Movement A collaborative and decentralised initiative –

started in 2002 – ‘The Montreal declaration’ All members support principle of free access to

law There is also cooperation in software

development for open standards in legal information management

Aims of the FALM Effectiveness of use and re-usability of the data Sustainable models Translation into other languages & cross-language

retrieval functionalities Adoption of open standards and metadata schemes for

primary materials

Why is free access to law complex?

Nature of legal materials…• Law reports of court cases• Legislation created by our governments• Treaties and agreements between international

bodies, eg UN• Journal articles

Legal Information Institutes

DOAJ - Open Access Journals – 125 for law

Durham statement: Open access to law school journals

bepress Legal Repository