Home » Articles posted by Susannaleers (Page 6)
Author Archives: Susannaleers
Fastcase Public Library of Law Opens its Doors
The Fastcase Public Library of Law was launched yesterday as "the most comprehensive free resource for legal research online." PLoL claims that it is the largest free law library in the world. A cursory examination shows an easy to use interface with links to caselaw, statutes, and regulations. You can look at federal law or choose your state from a dropdown menu. We'll all have to spend some time trying it out to see if it's a resource we can enthusiastically recommend.
There are also links to content you have to pay for - legal forms, for example, is one of the main tabs but you have to buy the forms after viewing them. I'm not crazy about that - But most of the links are free. Fastcase is a commercial legal research company that specializes in caselaw databases. Offering free, well-organized legal information is probably a smart business decision too if it builds the name and reputation of your company.
Harvard U. Faculty Votes for Open Access
This isn't about government information specifically, but it's big news for proponents of open access everywhere. This story is all over the news this morning - the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Ed., and Inside Higher Ed. among others. Harvard's Arts and Sciences faculty unanimously approved a plan on Tuesday night that will require faculty to post finished academic papers online free, unless scholars specifically decide to opt out of the open-access program. While other institutions have online repositories for their faculty’s work, Harvard is the first university in the United States to mandate open access to its faculty members’ research publications. Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computer science at Harvard who proposed the new policy, said after the vote that the decision “should be a very powerful message to the academic community that we want and should have more control over how our work is used and disseminated.”
The Harvard Crimson has an editorial about the importance of open access to scholarship in which the impact on libraries and scholarship is discussed. The Crimson also reports that the Harvard University Library will be in charge of implementing a new initiative to publish faculty scholarship. The library will set up an Office for Scholarly Communication to make the open-access repository an instrument for access to research across all disciplines in the spirit of the “one-university” environment that their OPAC now provides for holdings in all the libraries.
2 Million Pages of legal documents made available free online
Creative Commons has announced that in partnership with Public.Resource.Org and with legal representation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, it has purchased and has now made available at no charge the equivalent of nearly two million pages of legal documents. If printed and piled on top of each other, the documents would make a stack of books 348 feet tall. Included are all U.S. Supreme Court decisions and all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 on.
"Though these texts have always technically been in the public domain, the organizations had to purchase the electronic version from a private company that had compiled it. Now available at this link, they have also been converted to XHMTL so that anyone can develop user interfaces and search engines against the information."
Democratic Caucus: America at Risk
There is a new report from the Democratic Caucus, U.S. House of Representatives, entitled "America At Risk: Despite Continued Warnings... America's readiness continues to slide." The 7-page pdf summarizes how the cost of the war in Iraq is straining the budget and affecting the preparedness of the military to protect the country from domestic attack. It includes reports about how budget cutbacks are affecting the National Guards of individual states. hat tip: beSpacific! Continue reading
Latest Comments