Today brought the launch of the Journal of Open Access to Law, an open-access, peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to promoting international research on the topic of open access to law.
According to the journal’s home page, topics it plans to address include:
- Critical construction of legal information methods.
- Governance of new models of legal publishing.
- The relationship between open-access legal information and technology.
- Projects in open access to law.
- The technical challenges and economic opportunities created by open access to law and public sector information.
- The economic dimensions of open access to law.
- Trends and changes suggested by the globalization of access.
Principal editors of the journal are Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School, Ginevra Peruginelli and Enrico Francesconi of the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques in Italy, and Pompeu Casanovas of the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Articles in the first issue include:
- The Meaning of ‘Free Access to Legal Information’: A Twenty Year Evolution, by Graham Greenleaf, Andrew Mowbray and Philip Chung.
- Social Media and the Tyranny of Distance – Pacific Access to Legal Information, by Lenore Hamilton.
- A Right to Access Implies A Right to Know: An Open Online Platform for Research on the Readability of Law, by Michael Curtotti and Eric McCreath.
- Legivoc – connecting laws in a changing world, by Hughes-Jehan Vibert, Pierre Jouvelot and Benoît Pin.
- Citation Analysis of Canadian Case Law, by Thom Neale.
- Internet Enhancement of the Role of Civil Society in Promoting the Rule of Law in Transitional States, by Howard N. Fenton and Brian D. Anderson.
- The rise of the internet and its impact on the openness of the justice system in mainland China: improvements and limitations, by Zhuozhen Duan.
- Opportunities and challenges to free access to law in a changing world: a case of Zimbabwe Legal Information Institute (ZimLII), by Josiline Phiri.
- Visualizing the law: crisis mapping as an open tool for legal practice, by Marta Poblet.
See also Tom Bruce’s blog post about the launch.