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.

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.

Pearse and Keele on How Librarians Can Help Improve Law Journal Publishing

Michelle Pearse of the Harvard Law School Library and Benjamin Keele of the William and Mary Wolf Law Library, have posted How Librarians Can Help Improve Law Journal Publishing, on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Librarians are well-positioned to improve law journal publishing and help it evolve in the ever-changing digital environment. They can provide student editors with advice on a variety of issues such as copyright, data, preservation, and version control. Librarians can also help journals adopt technical standards and improve the discoverability and usability of journal content. While few libraries can adopt all these suggestions, a checklist of ideas is provided to help librarians select those that are most suitable to their libraries and journals.

Click here for a poster related to this paper.

Click here for a list of resources related to this topic.

April 2 Extended Call Deadline: LVI 2012: Law via the Internet Conference

A call for papers and presentations — with extended submission deadline of 2 April 2012 — has been issued for LVI 2012: The Law via the Internet Conference — the international conference of the legal information institutes and the free-access-to-law community — to be held October 7-9, 2012 at Cornell Law School in Ithaca, New York.

Papers and presentations are invited respecting the following tracks:

• Track 1: The Promise and Reality of e-Participation
• Track 2: The Business of (Open) Legal Publishing
• Track 3: Free Law and Government Policy
• Track 4: Application Development for Open Access and Engagement
• Track 5: Data Organization and Legal Informatics

For more information, please see the complete call.

HT @LIICornell.

March 15 deadline: Call for Papers and Presentations: LVI 2012: The Law via the Internet Conference

A call for papers and presentations — with submission deadline of 15 March 2012 — has been issued for LVI 2012: The Law via the Internet Conference — the international conference of the legal information institutes and the free-access-to-law community — to be held October 7-9, 2012 at Cornell Law School in Ithaca, New York.

Papers and presentations are invited respecting the following tracks:

• Track 1: The Promise and Reality of e-Participation
• Track 2: The Business of (Open) Legal Publishing
• Track 3: Free Law and Government Policy
• Track 4: Application Development for Open Access and Engagement
• Track 5: Data Organization and Legal Informatics

For more information, please see the complete call.

HT @LIICornell.

Call for Papers and Presentations: LVI 2012: The Law via the Internet Conference

A call for papers and presentations — with submission deadline of 15 March 2012 — has been issued for LVI 2012: The Law via the Internet Conference — the international conference of the legal information institutes and the free-access-to-law community — to be held October 7-9, 2012 at Cornell Law School in Ithaca, New York.

Papers and presentations are invited respecting the following tracks:

• Track 1: The Promise and Reality of e-Participation
• Track 2: The Business of (Open) Legal Publishing
• Track 3: Free Law and Government Policy
• Track 4: Application Development for Open Access and Engagement
• Track 5: Data Organization and Legal Informatics

For more information, please see the complete call.

HT @LIICornell.

Slides from 2011 ITTIG-CNR Workshop: From Information to Knowledge: On Line Access to Legal Information

Slides have been posted for presentations at From Information to Knowledge: On Line Access to Legal Information, a workshop organised by ITTIG-CNR in conjunction with Festival d’Europa 2011, on 6 May 2011, in Florence, Italy.

Full text of revised versions of many of the papers has been published in: Maria Angela Biasiotti and Sebastiano Faro (Eds.), From Information to Knowledge – Online Access to Legal Information: Methodologies, Trends and Perspectives (IOS, 2011).

Here is a list of the papers presented, with links to slides, abstracts, and revised full text where available:

• Giovanni Sartor, European University Institute: Access to legislation in the semantic web (click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• Cedric Chailloux, Publications Office of the European Union – EUR-Lex Unit: The new EUR-Lex: improvement and redesign (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text, by Els Breedstraet);
• Carol Tullo, The National Archives – Information Policy and Services – UK: Online access to UK legislation: strategy and structure (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• Filippo Donati, University of Florence: Access to legal information in the European Union (Click here for abstract and revised full text);
• G. Boella, L. Humphreys, P. Rossi, and L. van der Torre: Eunomos, a legal document management system based on legislative XML and ontologies (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• K.E. Petersen: Experiences with “Lex Dania Live” (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• B. Bassi: Automatic classification of documents for the Library of the Italian Chamber of Deputies (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• Melih Karakullukçu: Proper treatment of gaps in legal data and in electronic legal research (Click here for abstract and revised full text);
• Marc van Opijnen: European Case-law identifier: a short history and the broad outlook (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• G. Damele, M. Dogliani., A. Mastropaolo, F. Pallante and D.P. Radicioni: On legal argumentation tecniques: towards a systematic approach (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text.);
• D. Bourcier and M. Fernández-Barrera: Challenges regarding legal metadata. IP licensing and management of different cognitive levels in the Web 2.0 (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• G. Peruginelli, D. Tiscornia, G. Greenleaf, A. Mowbray and P. Chung: A comprehensive free access legal information system for Europe (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text);
• R. Caso, P. Guarda and V. Moscon: Open Access to legal scholarship and Open Archives: towards a better future? (Click here for slides; click here for abstract and revised full text).