Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2017
Open access (OA) in the United States is similar to a crazy quilt. There is a patchwork of OA policy and practice among the many federal, state, and local jurisdictions in the United States, as well as individual policies and practices in individual institutions, whether those are academic, business, or governmental. By way of a reminder, the United States is a federal republic consisting of 50 states, plus Washington, D.C., five major territories, and various possessions. Most readers know that already, but what one should also understand is that each of the states and territories has its own policies with respect to OA, as does the Federal government.
©2017 Mark Engsberg. The author is Director of Library Services and Assistant Professor of Law, Emory University School of Law, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
This is the summary text of an oral presentation, part of a panel on the subject of Open Access. It was delivered at the INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF LAW LIBRARIES, 35th Annual Course on International Law and Legal Information, Common Law Perspectives in a Global Context, Keble College, Oxford, 31 July–3 August 2016. The author's task was to present an introduction to Open Access in the US for an audience composed of many non-Americans and to do so in a very restrictive time limit. As such, the level of information in this presentation is very introductory.
3 See, e.g. http://www.USA.gov, http://uscode.house.gov, and Library of Congress websites, such as https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/index.html.
4 See, e.g. the Legal Information Institute, https://www.law.cornell.edu/. Note that this site is also useful for finding many state primary laws, too.
9 For additional details and an excellent overview of FASTR, see https://cyber.harvard.edu/hoap/Notes_on_the_Fair_Access_to_Science_and_Technology_Research_Act