Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2019
This contribution to the IALL Annual Course 2001 focuses on electronic law journals, an issue that doesn't seem to arouse much interest in either the Serials Community or the Legal Community. Electronic law journals are hardly ever mentioned by the Serials Community, which seems more occupied with scientific, technical and medical (STM) electronic journals than with journals from other disciplines. Electronic law journals don't attract many comments from the Legal Community either. There has been in the past few years an occasional focus on the topic, but it aimed essentially at proving that electronic journals in law had no particular reasons to survive the era of electronic self-publication. As such however, the phenomenon of electronic journals is rarely addressed by the professionals of legal information.
1 The term of electronic journal is used here in the broader sense of a journal available in electronic form. It disregards whether it parallels a printed counterpart or not.Google Scholar
2 See Hebbitts, Bernard J., “Last Writes? Reassessing the Law Review in the Age of Cyberspace,” New York University Law Review 71 (1996): 615. <http://www.law.***pitt.edu/hibbitts/lastrev.htrn>.Google Scholar
3 See Danner, Richard A., “Electronic Publication of Scholarly Information in Law: A View from the United States,” International Journal of Legal Information 28 (2000): 465. <http://www.law.duke.edu/fac/danner/paper4.html>.Google Scholar
4 Ibid. Google Scholar
5 See Naylor, Bernard and Geller, Marylin, “A Prehistory of Electronic Journals: The EIES and BLEND Projects,” Advances in Serials Management 5 (1995): 27.Google Scholar
6 See Harrington, William G., “A Brief History of Computer-Assisted Legal Research,” Law Library Journal 77 (1985): 543.Google Scholar
7 The first tangible sign of electronic availability of commercial journals on a large scale has been Elsevier's TULIP Project in 1992. See Marthyn Borghuis et al., TULIP Final Report (1996).Google Scholar
8 Examples are: Kluwer, Oxford University Press (OUP), Cambridge University Press (CUP), Beck Verlag.Google Scholar
9 See publishers as: Blackwell, Taylor & Francis.Google Scholar
10 For Sweet & Maxwell.Google Scholar
11 For some Swiss law journals.Google Scholar
12 This is the case for: Kluwer, OUP, CUP, Blackwell, Taylor & Francis.Google Scholar
13 The case of Sweet & Maxwell can be cited as an example. Its titles are available exclusively on Westlaw UK.Google Scholar
14 See Danner, , supra, citing a well known article on the topic, already written in the 30's by Professor Fred Rodell, note 25 at 476.Google Scholar
15 Overtaken by students, as seen before.Google Scholar
16 See <http://www.murdoch.edu.au/elaw/>..>Google Scholar
18 See <http://www.richmond.edu/~jolt/>..>Google Scholar
19 See <http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/jilt/>..>Google Scholar
21 See <http://law.kub.nl/ejcl/>..>Google Scholar
22 Journal launched at William & Mary School of Law. See Hardy, Trotter, “Starting an Electronic Journal in Law,” BILETA ‘96 Conference Proceedings, The Journal of Information, Law and Technology (JILT) 3 (1996). <http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/elj/jilt/bileta/1996/3hardy/default.htm>..>Google Scholar
23 Journal launched at Tilburg's University. See Roes, Hans, Electronic Journal of Comparative Law — Final Report (1998). <http://cwis.kub.nl/~dbi/users/roes/erclaw/ejclfinl.htm>..>Google Scholar
24 To cite only one: The Richmond Journal of Law & Technology. Google Scholar
25 Examples of such behaviors are: Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review, Stanford Technology Law Review. For an electronic journal to publish a parallel version of print volumes is often a first solution to the archiving problem. Similar examples can be found elsewhere. The now famous Journal of High Energy Physics (JHEP), electronic-only, released a print volume for archival purposes after its first year of activity.Google Scholar
26 See <http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/>..>Google Scholar
27 See <http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/global/>..>Google Scholar
28 See <http://highwire.stanford.edu/>..>Google Scholar
29 See <http://www.bepress.com/>..>Google Scholar
30 The term refers to electronic preprints, post-prints or self-published papers.Google Scholar
31 Archive meaning here a repository of research papers.Google Scholar
32 See <http://www.openarchives.org/>..>Google Scholar
33 See the Open Archives Initiative mission statement on the OAI website. <http://www.openarchives.org/>..>Google Scholar
34 See <http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/>..>Google Scholar
35 See <http://leda.law.harvard.edu/leda/>..>Google Scholar
36 See <http://eiop.or.at/erpa/>..>Google Scholar
37 See <http://www.ssrn.com/lsn/>..>Google Scholar
38 Especially to electronic preprints or electronic self-published papers.Google Scholar
39 Issues such as inclusion of multimedia materials in electronic documents are left aside in this presentation.Google Scholar
40 More, because a document is embedded in a web of other related documents.Google Scholar
41 Less, because parts of documents, figures or citations for instance, are documents in themselves. Users are sometimes only interested in a particular figure, or in the references. Hypertext facilitates access to such parts of documents.Google Scholar
42 See <http://www.crossref.org/>..>Google Scholar
43 Such as Lexis and Westlaw developed recently.Google Scholar
44 See <http://www.austlii.edu.au/>..>Google Scholar
45 See <http://www.loc.gov/law/glin/GLINv1/>..>Google Scholar
46 See the policy regulating legal writings in GLIN at <http://lcweb2.loc.gov/law/***GLINv1/helplw.html/>..>Google Scholar
47 Such as the linking solutions resulted from the SFX research. See Sompel, Herbert Van de and Hochstenbach, Patrick, “Reference Linking in a Hybrid Library Environment, Part 1: Frameworks for Linking,” D-Lib Magazine, April 1999, <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april99/van_de_sompel/04van_de_sompel-pt1.html>..>Google Scholar
48 To cite only one, the example of the legal publisher Context Ltd with his database JUSTIS shows how advanced text processing techniques can overcome the efforts required in the creation of hypertext links. But the JUSTIS database remaining a closed framework, it can't be compared to the approaches for linking frameworks in an open architecture. See the description of linking solutions for the JUSTIS database by Needle, Justin, “The Automatic Linking of Legal Citations,” Journal of Information, Law & Technology (JILT) 3 (2000), <http://elj.Warwick.ac.uk/jilt/00-3/needle.html>.Google Scholar
49 See the OAI website, supra. Google Scholar
50 See the product Hein-On-Line at <http.//heinonline.org> and its disclaimer of cutting edge technology.+and+its+disclaimer+of+cutting+edge+technology.>Google Scholar
51 See Guedon, Jean-Claude, In Oldenburg's Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers and the Control of Scientific Publishing (2001) (Paper presented in May 2001 at the 138th Membership Meeting of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), a meeting held in conjunction with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries in Toronto). <http://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/138/guedon_***aboutpaper.html>..>Google Scholar
52 See the American Institute of Physics’ virtual journals at <http://www.virtualjournals.org/>..>Google Scholar
53 See IOP Select at <http://www.iop.org/Select/>..>Google Scholar
54
See the journal's homepage at <http://aims.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pep.nsf>. Refer as well to a presentation by PeP's initiators. See Hitchcock, Steve and Hall, Wendy, How Dynamic Journals Can Interconnect with Open Access Archives (2001) (Paper presented at the ICCC/IFIP 5th Conference on Electronic Publishing, ELPUB 2001, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, July 2001). <http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/***~sh94r/elpub01-online.html/>..+Refer+as+well+to+a+presentation+by+PeP's+initiators.+See+Hitchcock,+Steve+and+Hall,+Wendy,+How+Dynamic+Journals+Can+Interconnect+with+Open+Access+Archives+(2001)+(Paper+presented+at+the+ICCC/IFIP+5th+Conference+on+Electronic+Publishing,+ELPUB+2001,+University+of+Kent+at+Canterbury,+UK,+July+2001).+
55 See the corresponding webpage at Cambridge's University: <http://www.law.cam.ac.uk/ESSAYS/schol.htm>..>Google Scholar
56 See the journal's homepage on metalaw's website at <http://www.metalaw.de/jmz/index.php3>..>Google Scholar
57 See <http://www.ssrn.com/>..>Google Scholar
58 See the journal's homepage at <http://www.intlpress.com/ATMP/archive/>..>Google Scholar
59 See ArXiv at <http://xxx.lanl.gov/>..>Google Scholar
60 See Ginsparg, Paul, Winners and Losers in the Global Research Village (1996) (Paper submitted for UNESCO Conference in Paris, Feb. 19–23, 1996). <http://arXiv.org/blurb/pg96unesco.html>..>Google Scholar
61 See Guedon, , supra. Google Scholar
62 Ibid. Google Scholar
63 See Smith, John W. T., “The Deconstructed Journal – A New Model for Academic Publishing,” 12 Learned Publishing April 1999. Also available at <http://library.ukc.ac.uk/library/papers/jwts/d-journal.htm>..>Google Scholar