Directors of ten law school libraries, including Harvard’s John Palfrey, have signed an “aspirational” document, called the Durham Statement on Open Access, that “calls for all law schools to stop publishing their journals in print format and to rely instead on electronic publication coupled with a commitment to keep the electronic versions available in stable, open, digital formats.”

This is wonderful.

The statement calls for the end of paper versions of the journals, not merely supplementing them with electronic versions, because printing them costs so much and is bad for the environment. I don’t know if the drafters of the Statement were also thinking that going purely digital would help force a change in mindsets, but I suspect that that would be one of the most important consequences.

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