There’s a new open access guide available now online that can serve as a standard—and free resource—for Canadian law firms, law journals, law societies and law schools. The Canadian Open Access Legal (COAL) Citation Guide was created as an alternative to the cost-prohibitive options available in Canada.
The dominant legal citation guide is the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation, better known as the McGill Guide, which was first published in 1986 and is now in its 10th edition by the McGill Law Journal.
“There are a couple of key problems with the McGill Guide that keep coming up for people,” says James Bachmann, Instruction Librarian at UBC Law Library and editor-in-chief of the COAL Citation guide. “First is that it’s expensive.”
In fact, the online subscription version of the McGill Guide is prohibitively expensive for most institutions, including UBC.
The idea to create an open access alternative to the McGill Guide came about during a meeting of the Academic Law Libraries Special Interest Group, which is part of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries. When the idea proved popular, Bachmann, who co-chairs the Special Interest Group, helped pull together an editorial team to spearhead the project.
In creating the first edition of the COAL Citation Guide, care was taken to reach out to stakeholders in different provinces to ensure that the citation formats outlined in the guide account for differences in legislation. The COAL guide will continue to be updated by a dedicated editorial team of experienced professionals who meet regularly, with the goal of making improvements to the guide based on user feedback. As an online resource, the COAL guide is not only more accessible but can also be more agile in responding to feedback. Updates to the guide can be made more quickly and seamlessly than comparable print references, which typically operate on longer print publication schedules.
“We want to really be responsive to feedback… we’re hoping that people get in touch with us and let us know what they want to see in [future editions] of the guide,” says Bachmann.
Launched in June, the COAL Citation Guide grew out of UBC Law Library’s Legal Citation Guide. The English-language version of the COAL Citation Guide is available now through the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII), a non-profit organization that provides open online access to judicial decisions and legislative documents. A French-language version is already underway.
“This guide will be a valuable resource for anyone who needs to know how to cite legal materials,” says Bachmann.