Open Access to Outcomes of Publicly Funded Research

According to the Montreal Declaration on Free Access to Law, "Publicly funded secondary (interpretative) legal materials should be accessible for free but permission to republish is not always appropriate or possible. In particular free access to legal scholarship may be provided by legal scholarship repositories, legal information institutes or other means." This paper aims to outline the essential issues of the debate on open access to outcomes of publicly funded research. The debate is the setting for the topic covered by the Montreal Declaration. After clarifying the relevant key expressions ("outcomes", "publicly funded" and "open access"), the paper presents some national, international and supranational initiatives in this field, also giving attention to the main arguments in favour of open access. Finally, the paper discusses the emerging approach to the topic and its relevance for research in the legal field.