Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Friday, August 22, 2008

On Northwestern Law Review's OA essay series

Gregory S. McNeal, Thoughts on Innovation in Law Review Publishing (Part 1 of 2), The Blog, August 11, 2008 (Thanks to Law School Innovation.)

My recent experience publishing with the Northwestern University Law Review got me thinking about innovation in law review publishing. ...

My essay ... deals ... a timely subject with rapidly changing law. Because of this I faced some publishing dilemmas. My draft was regular essay length ... but was also too timely to wait for a law review issue to be printed. Given the work I put into the essay, I didn’t want it to sit in SSRN or BePress hoping for a cite or some attention via listserv. It was too long to blog, and I didn’t want to relegate it to a “less prestigious” (whatever that means) publication by accepting any offer I could find based solely on timeliness. As I tried to find a home for my essay, I thought that The Northwestern Law Review was innovative enough to accommodate my needs. Exploring their website I found that they have a feature known as “colloquy” essays, which follow the same editorial standards for acceptance into the Law Review (a big hurdle) but are published as soon as editors complete their cite-checking and BlueBook review. What that meant was if I could get accepted, I could publish my thoughts while the legal and policy debate was still underway.

... That allowed for immediate publication of my essay (after editorial review) on the Northwestern Law Review website, along with publication in the completed print issue later this fall. I still have to wait for the final page numbers, but I have a citation that other scholars can rely on ... and more importantly the ideas are out there as part of the dialogue.

There are some other cool features that the Northwestern Law Review includes with their webpage. First, are open comments below the essay. ... [W]hat it means for other scholars is that they can immediately respond to my thoughts and link to their own related scholarship. Bloggers can blog on their own site about my essay, and can preview their thoughts in the comments, dropping a link to their own blogs. All of this makes for an interactive dialogue, which is really what scholarly debate should be about.

In the spirit of scholarly debate, Northwestern will also host a series of “colloquy posts” where other professors will write short response essays about my work. Those essays, which will only appear on-line, will be indexed in Lexis and Westlaw. ...

What really struck me about going through this process was how much sense it makes, and how innovative it is. ...

Moreover, the timeliness of their system, the indexing of response essays, and open comments all seem to be great examples of a potential part of future of legal scholarship. For legal scholars seeking to write about on-going developments in rapidly changing fields, a print venue supplemented with early and rapid on-line publication is a valuable asset. ... [T]he system Northwestern has in place demonstrates how law reviews can provide a forum for timely scholarship that aims to have an impact beyond the halls of the academy.

Of course, all of this got me thinking. Why would any law review wait until they build an entire issue before making the .PDF of an article available on line? It seems allowing the publication process to be driven by when an issue is “full” is an unnecessary limitation in this age of .PDFs, blogs, and print-on-demand. While having a printed issue and reprints is nice, and perhaps required by some, that technical limitation shouldn’t define the publication process. ...

See also Part 2, where McNeal suggests other changes for law review publishing.