Open publishing in the law – insight, commentary, and analysis – is developing quite a bit differently than open publishing in science.

As an example, the fight for open publishing in science is continuing with a group of Redditors coming together to archive over 85 million copyrighted scientific papers from the website Sci-Hub and make an open-source library that cannot be taken down, according to a report by Chris Young for Interesting Engineering

As way of background. Sci-Hub is a “shadow library” website that provides free access to millions of research papers and books, without regard to copyright by bypassing publishers’ paywalls in various ways.

Research papers, per Sci-Hub, need to be read, shared and cited by other researchers – they contain detailed description of new results and experiments.

The site is extensively used, worldwide, serving about a half million requests per day. The number of articles is approaching 100 million. 

Sci-Hub is taking on publishers head on. We’re taking your stuff and making it freely available for society’s good. Like it or not. 

Via legal blogging, open publishing in the law is in the beginnings of doing an end run on traditional legal publishers and their copyrighted materials. 

Traditional legal publishers simply cannot keep up with with practicing lawyers, legal tech leaders and academics when it comes to covering niche areas of the law and the delivery of legal services. 

The result will be an aggregated body of open law to be read, cited and shared by both those in the legal arena and the public. 

The legal profession needn’t fight for open legal publishing. It’s already happening via thousands of legal blog articles a day.