Debut: Journal of Open Access to Law

Members of the Free Access to Law Movement recently announced the debut of a multidisciplinary journal showcasing research related to legal information that is made openly available on the Internet.   Please take a moment to check it out  at http://joal.law.cornell.edu/.

We at the LII and our colleagues around the world hope that JOAL will become a place that can stand on its own to present work about open access to law.  Having previously lacked a home of its own, research on open access to law has traditionally been communicated via the journals of other disciplines, sometimes losing its unique flavor along the way.

In addition to addressing the important policy question of why open access is important, research in this field (and hence the content featured in JOAL) frequently implicates work in other, related disciplines.  For example, the intersection of open access research and information science can provide practical publishing, organizing, and retrieval techniques.  One aim of JOAL is to help academic research about open access find an audience within the community of legal publishers who can make good use of it for practical ends.

When open access flourishes, the public encounters legal information in new ways and often responds in a manner that is both surprising and poorly understood.  In fact, JOAL hopes to provide a forum for studying and discussing such phenomena.

For more than twenty years, the LII has served as something of a beacon for open access advocates in the United States and abroad.  And your donations help ensure we have the funding needed to participate in the conferences and other functions where open access advocates and scholars meet.  In fact, The Journal of Open Access to Law was conceived over a period of years and put finally into motion by participants meeting during the last two Law Via the Internet conferences.

Much of the credit for JOAL belongs not to the LII, but to a veritable all-star team of international academics and researchers.  JOAL’s masthead reveals a truly global team who serve as section editors, reviewers–not to mention the decidedly international roster of authors.  We especially wish to acknowledge the efforts of Spain’s Pompeu Casanovas and the Italian duo of Enrico Francesconi and Ginevra Peruginelli, all of whom worked tirelessly to make JOAL a reality.