Law School Journals and Open Access

On june 15, 2009 we received an interesting question by e-mail regarding law school journals and open access. Somewhat later we received another e-mail from the same person, summarizing the responses to her original query. Due to increasing interest and concern regarding information access issues, including open access to law journals we are posting both the original question and responses below. In order to preserve confidentiality we will not be mentioning names but are very grateful to the legal bibliographer who raised the original question and summarized the responses:

QUESTION:

Do any of your law school journals publish their open access contents through a repository (like DSpace, BePress, etc..), or use a system like OJS-Open Journal Systems (PKP) to publish online? Do they simply post their issues/articles as pdf’s to the law school server?

RESPONSES:

-3 libraries said their journals are not open access.

-2 responded that their journals post them as pdf’s to the law school server/their journal websites.

-Rob Richards said that he thinks that Utah uses OJS for their journals http://epubs.utah.edu/index.php/ulr (From the website, it looks like that is the case._ He also thought that Northwestern might use Sharepoint for the online versions of its journals, but I have not yet confirmed.

-This summer, Pace [University in New York] has a project adding the entire backfile for all three of our law reviews here at Pace to the Pace Digital Commons. They have finished the Pace International Law Review http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/intlaw/ and are currently working on Pace Law Review http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/lawrev/ . After that, they will do Pace Environmental Law Review http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/envlaw/