See Part 1 for What is Open Access? and How can Open Access support equity and inclusion?
How do UofSC Law librarians support Open Access?
There is no shortage of ways in which librarians at UofSC Law (and in many other libraries) support Open Access. Here are two examples:
Open Casebooks
Despite the high prices of casebooks, most casebook authors are not getting rich from those sales; they typically rely on a salary from other full-time work. Because Open Access textbooks help cash-strapped law students without significantly harming authors, authors are increasingly opting to create Open Access casebooks.
Law librarian Andy Kretschmar notes that there are currently some Open Access casebooks findable in the UofSC Law Library catalog, including three by Dean Colin Miller.
Scholar Commons
Law librarians work with law faculty, law student journal editors, and UofSC librarians to get permissions and upload works to scholarcommons.sc.edu/law. Law faculty can choose to make their articles freely available at scholarcommons.sc.edu/law_facpub, no matter where those articles are published, as long as the faculty have not given up their right to do so. Both the South Carolina Journal of International Law and Business (SCJILB) and the South Carolina Law Review have chosen to make back issues freely available via Scholar Commons, and SCJILB also makes its current issues available.
Approximately 37,000 times per year, articles are downloaded from UofSC Law’s Scholar Commons. The work of the UofSC Law Library (especially Lillian Bates, Dan Brackmann, Melanie Griffin, and Candle Wester) in digitizing back issues from print, obtaining permissions from authors and publishers, and putting articles online in an organized, findable way is making a difference.