Ramsay: SSRN and Law Journals – Rivals or Allies?

Professor Ian Ramsay of University of Melbourne Law School has published SSRN and Law Journals – Rivals or Allies? International Journal of Legal Information, Vol. 40, No. 1-2, pp. 134-145 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

The author identifies and evaluates the respective merits of publication in law journals and publication on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) – the largest open access repository for legal scholarship. This evaluation leads to the conclusion that at this stage of the evolution of law journals and SSRN, there are advantages in authors publishing both in journals and on SSRN. However, publication on SSRN can have particular advantages for authors in smaller countries.

Cotropia & Petherbridge: The Dominance of Teams in the Production of Legal Knowledge

Professor Christopher A. Cotropia of University of Richmond School of Law and Professor Dr. Lee Petherbridge of Loyola Law School of Los Angeles have posted a working paper entitled The Dominance of Teams in the Production of Legal Knowledge, on SSRN.

Here is the abstract:

Using a database that contains over 19,000 law review articles published in top 100 law reviews between 1990 and 2010, we demonstrate that team authors dominate solo authors in the production of legal knowledge. Team research is on average more frequently cited than individual research, and teams are more likely than individuals to produce exceptionally high impact research. These results suggest that a legal research culture that encourages cooperativity and collaboration could foster an intellectual connectedness helpful to improving the quality of knowledge production by legal academics.

Call for Papers: LVI 2013: Law via the Internet Conference

The call for papers and presentation proposals has been issued for LVI 2013: Law via the Internet Conference, to be held 26-27 September 2013 on the Channel Island of Jersey.

The conference Website does not seem to state the deadline for submitting papers or proposals. If you know the submission deadline, please feel free to tell us in the comments to this post.

[UPDATE 11 February 2013: The conference organizers now say the submission deadline is 31 March 2013.]

Papers are invited on the topics covered by any of the seven tracks in which the conference program is divided:

• E-Learning: distance, blended, open, mobile, gaming, MOOCing and more?
• Online legal information – starting from scratch
• Legal knowledge in the age of the semantic web
• Communicating our work: journals, blogs and other ways of publishing about open access
• Privacy v open government in legal publishing
• Emerging patterns of information access and usage
• Technological development and free access to law

The conference Twitter account is @JerseyLVI2013 and the conference hashtag is #lvi2013

For details about the tracks, please see the track Websites.

For more details about the conference, please see the conference Website.

Widener on Making Law Journal Content More Accessible to the Public

Michael N. Widener, JD, MS, has published Driving Pedestrian Traffic to Law Journals, Law Library Journal, 14(4), 569-575 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

Recent technological advances enable the legal academy and law student editors to embed aids to understanding the law journal’s content in the articles and student notes published there. As there are compelling social purposes for making the content of law journals more accessible to lay inquirers, the author advocates incorporating into law journals devices such as QR codes and content summaries written for the layperson.

Bruce Reports on LVI 2012 Workshop on Open Scientific Publishing and Communication on Law and ICT

A Workshop on Open Scientific Publishing and Communication on Law and ICT was held 10 October 2012 in Ithaca, New York, immediately following LVI 2012: The Law via the Internet Conference, held 7-9 October 2012, at the Legal Information Institute (LII), Cornell Law School, Ithaca, New York, USA. The workshop had the informal title of “Steve the Librarian.” Tom Bruce of the LII sends the following report on the workshop. Thanks to Tom for allowing me to repost his report:

Since I ended up acting as the informal “chair” of the meeting, I suppose I should be the one to fill everyone in. It was, in fact, a meeting of 8 or 10 people around a breakfast table at the Holiday Inn, and not a workshop in any ordinary sense. But it was the latest event in a chain of discussions around this subject that began at LVI in Florence, and continued through the LVI meetings in Durban and Hong Kong, sometimes in conference sessions, sometimes in the FALM business meetings, and sometimes in airport lounges. It is fair to say that this is a recurring topic and an important one.

We outlined three major needs in the field.

One (which I’ve pushed to the point of being a broken record on the subject) is the need for low-threshold, internal communication among the various subdisciplines that touch open access to law. We’ve taken on some of that in VoxPopulii, first under your capable leadership and now with Stephanie Davidson and Christine Kirchberger at the helm. It’s vitally necessary that legal informatics researchers learn about the needs of publishers, publishers about librarians, librarians about informatics, and social scientists about all of them (not a complete census but you see what I mean) and that the resulting literature be accessible to non-specialists in the field that is talking about itself. There is room for much more than VoxPopuLii here.

A second is for a publishing venue for people who are working on open access to legal information as researchers in various fields, particularly younger scholars. If you can agree for a moment that we might describe their fields as, for the most part, “law and…” fields, then the journals they now have available to them are all in the fields that are on the other side of the three dots. This has a distorting effect. The availability of very good open-journal software for electronic publication makes good alternatives possible. There is general agreement that because there are so many fields bordering what we all do there is a potentially difficult problem of defining boundaries for such a journal. Initial forays will thus focus pretty tightly on open access to law. Even that is potentially tricky, given that government information of many kinds might be eligible and useful, so firm editorial leadership is called for.

A third is for a comprehensive archive and index to existing work in the field, to be maintained as new stuff is added. One might describe its boundaries as being “all the stuff Rob Richards posts about” , with substantial work on mapping it having been done by you both in formal bibliographies and in blog posts and Twitter. We think there is the possibility of working either with an existing apparatus such as the physics arXiv, or with a purpose-built DSpace installation or some other repository.

Participants in the discussion included Pompeu Casanovas, Graham Greenleaf, Enrico Francesconi, Ginevra Peruginelli, James Lambert, John Heywood, Cicely Wilson, John Joergensen, Amy Taylor, and others whose names I apologize for not retrieving from my faulty memory.

Various individuals have been tasked with pursuing initial steps toward these objectives with the aim of having all or part in place by the time of the next LVI conference (tentatively believed to be in September 2013). We’ll post news as things become concrete.

Archived Tweets and Resources from LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference

Click here for archived Twitter tweets, in .csv format, from LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference, held 7-9 October 2012 at the Legal Information Institute, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA.

Click here for the conference Website.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lvi2012, and the Twitter account for the conference is @LVI2012.

Click here for the conference program and abstracts of presentations.

Some conference sessions will be livestreamed here.

For blog posts and other resources related to the conference, please see the comments to this post.

October 7-9: LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference

LVI 2012: The 25th Law via the Internet Conference, is being held 7-9 October 2012, at the Legal Information Institute, Cornell University Law School, in Ithaca, New York, USA.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lvi2012, and the Twitter account for the conference is @LVI2012.

Click here for archived Twitter tweets, in .csv format, from the conference.

Click here for the conference program and abstracts of presentations.

Some conference sessions will be livestreamed here.

Holt and Alexander on Moving Student Law Journals Towards an Open-Access Publishing Model

David Brian Holt and Whitney P. Alexander, both of Santa Clara University School of Law, have posted slides of their presentation entitled Moving your student law journals towards an open-access publishing model, given at CALICon 2012: The Conference for Law School Computing, held 21-23 June 2012 at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, California, USA.

Here is the abstract:

This session discusses the trend among law schools towards an open access publishing model for both faculty scholarship and student law reviews. Included in this discussion is a brief overview of the Durham Statement on open access legal publishing and the advantages for law schools who move to this publishing model (including improved accessibility and access and even increased citation rates). Additionally, this session includes how to promote an institutional repository within a law school and how to develop relationships with faculty and other stakeholders to acquire content. Finally, this session discusses the successes and problems at Santa Clara Law which recently moved all three of their student law reviews to an open access publishing model using Digital Commons from BePress.

Shapiro and Pearse on The Most-Cited Law Review Articles of All Time

Fred R. Shapiro of the Yale Law School Library and Michelle Pearse of the Harvard Law School Library have published The Most-Cited Law Review Articles of All Time, Michigan Law Review, 110, 1483-1520 (2012). Here is the abstract:

This Essay updates two well-known earlier studies (dated 1985 and 1996) by the first coauthor, setting forth lists of the most-cited law review articles. New research tools from the HeinOnline and Web of Science databases now allow lists to be compiled that are more thorough and more accurate than anything previously possible. Tables printed here present the 100 most-cited legal articles of all time, the 100 most-cited articles of the last twenty years, and some additional rankings. Characteristics of the top-ranked publications, authors, and law schools are analyzed as are trends in schools of legal thought. Data from the all-time rankings shed light on contributions to legal scholarship made over a long historical span; the recent-article rankings speak more to the impact of scholarship produced in the current era. The authors discuss alternative tools and metrics for measuring the impact of legal scholarship, running selected articles from the rankings through these tools to serve as points of illustration. The authors then contemplate how these alternative tools and metrics intersect with traditional citation studies and how they might impact legal scholarship in the future.

Accepted Presentations for LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference

The accepted presentations and their abstracts have been posted for LVI 2012: The 25th Law via the Internet Conference, to be held 7-9 October 2012, at Cornell University Law School in Ithaca, New York, USA.