"Neutral" citations

VoxPopuLII, the blog of the Cornell Legal Information Institute, had an interesting post yesterday about what it calls "environmentally-friendly" or "neutral" legal citations. In Canada, according to the article, almost three fourths of recent citations to case law use the "neutral citation" - an industry-independent, open citation/identifier assigned by courts to their decisions. The article goes on to talk about why this is having a significant effect on the legal publishing industry in Canada.