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.

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.

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.

Openness and Interoperability: The Aims of Recent Legal Informatics Activity

My new post entitled Openness and Interoperability: The Aims of Recent Legal Informatics Activity, is now available on Slaw.ca, the Canadian legal blog.

New on VoxPopuLII: Gray on The Imperatives of Access to Legal Information in South Africa

Eve Gray of the University of Cape Town IP Law and Policy Research Unit, has posted Incomprehension Compounded by Mistranslation – The Imperatives of Access to Legal Information in South Africa, on the VoxPopuLII Blog, published by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University Law School.

In this post, Ms. Gray describes the South African legal publishing industry, and the factors that inhibit competition and innovation among established firms in that sector. Using the example of the Report of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Ms. Gray describes how those factors limit most South Africans’ access to legal information.

Ms. Gray describes the South African Government’s progress in providing access to legal resources on its Website, and the efforts of the Southern African Legal Information Institute (SAFLII) to extend and enhance that access.

Ms. Gray identifies nonprofit organizations and research centers — which employ new business models featuring open access digital publishing combined with fee-based access to services or printed works — as sites of innovation in South African legal publishing. Ms. Gray concludes by describing several of these innovative organizations and assessing their impact on public access to legal information.

This post will be of interest to members of the legal publishing industry, to the legal community generally and the access to justice community in particular, and to advocates of open access to legal information.

Preview of Open Access Legal Casebooks Available from eLangdell: CALI

A preview is now available of the open access digital legal casebooks being developed as part of the eLangdell Project sponsored by CALI: The Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction.

The preview — which consists of portions of Roger C. Park and Douglas D. McFarland’s Evidence for Civil Procedure Students — is available in several formats: ePub, mobi, PDF, and HTML, and is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

Click here for more information about the eLangell Project.

[NOTE: An earlier version of this post stated that the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University was a current sponsor of eLangdell. Our friends at CALI have told us that Berkman Center no longer sponsors eLangdell, so I've revised the post accordingly.]

Mayer on The Future of the Legal Casebook & CALI’s eLangdell Project

John P. Mayer, Executive Director of CALI: The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction gave a presentation entitled The Future of the Legal Casebook & CALI’s eLangdell Project at the Chicago Law.gov Workshop, held 21 May 2010 in Chicago, Illinois, USA.

In his presentation, Mr. Mayer describes how CALI and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University are applying the open educational resources approach to law school instructional materials, through the eLangdell Project and the Legal Education Commons. The presentation also provides an overview of the current state of law school instructional resources technology — including the use of ebooks in law schools — and the future development of that technology.

Click here for more information about the Law.gov legal open government data project.