Posted by David Post:
PLOL, or The Slow Death of the Law Review As We Know It:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_03_01-2009_03_07.shtml#1236437597
[I don't think anyone has already posted on this, but apologies if I'm
wrong; this seems like the sort of thing VCers would be all
over/DavidP]
The directors of many of the leading law libraries (Harvard, Duke,
Stanford, Yale, and a number of others) have recently adopted a
[1]very important policy statement bearing on the future of law
reviews, calling for
". . . all law schools to stop publishing their journals in print
format and to rely instead on electronic publication coupled with a
commitment to keep the electronic versions available in stable,
open, digital formats."
It's an important development, I believe. It's true, of course, as
those of you who have been or are currently in law school know, that
law library directors do not have any direct responsibility for law
review publication; as a result, the statement is only of significance
as an advisory matter, and it can't be implemented without a lot of
other things happening and a lot of other people on board.
Nonetheless, I think it adds an important voice to the debate about
the future of the law review, and another hole in the hull of the law
review ship, which has been taking on water for some time now.
The model here is the remarkable (and remarkably successful) [2]Public
Library of Science (PLoS), which now publishes 7 different open access
journals in biology and medicine. [Full disclosure: I was involved in
the formation of PLoS, not through any formal affiliation but because
of close ties to one of its founders, my friend and sometime co-author
[3]Mike Eisen] Open access in the bio-medical sciences is a big deal,
in a way that open access in the legal literature is not; there's a
very large amount of money at stake, for one thing, as well as a more
direct and obvious link to peoples' health and well-being. Loosening
the stranglehold of the print publishers on information in that field
is no small thing, and while PLoS hasn't eliminated that stranglehold,
it has made serious inroads; it makes me reasonably confident that a
true PLoL can't be too far behind. [And no discussion of open access
in law should fail to note the many years of hard work by Peter Martin
and Tom Bruce, of the [4]Cornell Legal Information Institute, and
[5]Mike Carroll of Villanova, in trying to build a true open access
platform for law and legal information]
References
1. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/publications/durhamstatement
2. http://www.plos.org/
3. http://rana.lbl.gov/eisen/
4. http://www.law.cornell.edu/
5.
http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=michael_carroll
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