Over the past few decades, a new process has dominated how States treat foreign investment and the consequences to States for breaching international standards. The system's key feature, the means for settling a foreign investor's dispute with a State that hosts the investment, lacks traditional elements of State judicial systems. Instead, it is a creature of State consent as reflected in international investment agreements (IIAs). In IIAs, States promise to treat foreign investment and the investors in a certain, fundamentally fair, way. Many IIAs authorize foreign investors and States to select private arbitrators to resolve claims that host States breached their promises under the IIA. The arbitrators, in turn, are empowered to issue arbitral awards.

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.

Several years ago, the Australian Information Commissioner decided that, subject to security and privacy and so forth, all of its public-sector information should be, “free, easily discoverable, machine readable and re-useable.”

The presentation delivered in Oxford during IALL's 35th Annual Course on Law and Legal Information offered my perspective on Open Access to legal information within the context of Access to Justice in Canada. Please find below an overview of my presentation.

This short overview will focus on three points: open access of primary sources, access to journal articles highlighting the experience of the repository of Toulouse 1 Capitole university, and perspectives for the future with a proposed French bill “for a Digital Republic.” These three parts will be illustrated with three websites.

This article provides an overview of the current status of UK national open access (OA) policies, their implementation, and the responses of HEIs (Higher Education Institutions) and other key players. Prior to 2012 a number of funders' OA policies had been published. Although many medical scientists were publishing OA articles and subject pre-print repositories were active in some disciplines (for example ArXiv and RePEc EconPapers), most academics were not complying with their funder's OA policy, the policies were not being policed, and in many disciplines, OA was not on researchers' radar.

The article concludes that OA in the UK has changed considerably in recent years and is continuing to evolve rapidly, mainly due to the effect of UK funder OA policies. There is an urgent need for increased automation to support greater accuracy and efficiency, which needs input from, and will benefit, the major players: researchers, universities, funders, and publishers. Sustainable funding needs to be coupled with efforts to drive down costs. The reasons behind the push for OA needs discussion with researchers, some of whom view OA as an additional burden. The value placed on OA needs to be weighted more towards the benefits of OA within a less compliance dominated environment. There is a long way to go, but reflecting on the last four years, the UK has made enormous strides towards widespread OA.