Law consists of legislation, judicial decisions, and interpretative material. Public legal information means legal information produced by public bodies that have a duty to produce law and make it public. Such information includes the law itself (so-called primary materials) as well as various secondary (interpretative) public sources such as reports on preparatory work and law reform and resulting from boards of inquiry and available scholarly writing. The free access to law movement is a set of international projects that share a common vision to promote and facilitate open access to public legal information. The objectives of this chapter are to outline the free access to law movement, to set out the philosophies and principles behind this, and to discuss the role that open source software has played both in terms of its use and development.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.