Criminal Law Library Blog

The following is an announcement from Luis Villa, the outgoing Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review (STLR). Beginning with Volume X STLR will become a "formal open access journal and comply with the recent Durham Statement on open access" and will become the first Columbia journal to publish through the Columbia University Library's archival quality Academic Commons publication system:

ANNOUNCEMENT AND LETTER:

Most of you know me from past ventures; for those who don't, my
apologies for reaching out to you in this manner, but it is a one-time
event that I hope you'll find it worth your attention.

My name is Luis Villa, and I'm the outgoing Editor-in-Chief of the
Columbia Science and Technology Law Review (STLR). I'm writing to you
because of your past interests in open access scholarship and the law.
I am excited to announce that beginning with this volume, STLR will
become a formal open access journal and comply with the recent Durham
Statement on open access. As part of that process, our articles will
be published under a Creative Commons NC-ND license, and we'll become
the first Columbia journal to publish through the Columbia Library's
archival-quality Academic Commons publication system.

While small, our journal has always had consistently high quality
(third in citations per article amongst science and technology law
journals, according to the Washington and Lee ratings). We hope that
this move will further improve the visibility, availability, and
permanence of our scholarship, for the benefit of both the journal and
of our authors. We also hope it will allow us to be a trend-setter for
other Columbia journals, as we all inevitably move into the brave new
economics of publicly available scholarship. I was excited to hear
today that one other Columbia journal has already approached the
library about following in our footsteps, and as you're all aware this
is part of a larger trend across all law schools (exemplified by the
Durham Statement.)

While we realize that in the grand scheme of things this is not huge
news, we think that as part of the larger, recent trend towards open
access this is to some extent newsworthy. If you'd like to write about
this in your own blogs or other work, you can read our formal
announcement and link to it at
http://www.stlr.org/volumes/volume-x-2008-2009/letter-from-the-eic/

Besides the Open Access announcement, we also think we have some high
quality scholarship in this volume, particularly interesting pieces on
the mailbox rule in an internet age and a game-based simulation of the
economics of patents. The volume itself is available at
http://stlr.org/volumes/volume-x-2008-2009/ or directly from the
Columbia Library at the (slightly more cumbersome ;)
http://academiccommons.columbia.edu:8080/ac/handle/10022/AC:P:29796

Finally, if you're interested in publishing with us in the future, you
can reach out to the EIC directly at stlr@stlr.org, or through BePress
ExpressO.

Thanks for your time and attention; please feel free to reach out to
me if you have any questions or thoughts.

Luis

Full text of letter from EIC follows:

Hello, and welcome to Volume X of the Columbia Science and Technology
Law Review.

Starting with this volume, we've made two significant changes to how
we publish, and I wanted to write this note to explain those changes
and why we did them.

First, we've decided to meet the standards set out by the Open Access
Law Program and formally seek to become an Open Access Law Journal. To
that end, we've refined our author agreement (already very liberal) to
explicitly ensure that authors retain their copyrights, and we are
making our agreement public on our website. At the same time, we are
also embracing open publication, formally putting our articles under a
Creative Commons Non-Commercial No-Derivatives license, and allowing
our authors to distribute themselves under even more liberal licenses
if they so choose.

Second, in order to meet the standards set forward by the Durham
Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship, we're moving our
backend from our own server to professionally maintained,
archival-quality services run by the Columbia Library. We were already
publishing in the relatively open PDF format. As a result of these two
choices, we can now be fully confident that our digital scholarship
has the same permanence and long-term shelf life as a paper journal-
a big step forward for digital scholarship in general.

For readers of our journal, these two small changes should not have
much impact. Expect the same high quality content, delivered more
reliably, and with clearer terms explaining your ability to use and
share our scholarship with others. In addition, as a result of our
partnership with the Columbia Libraries, in coming volumes you'll see
new functionality on our website, like subscriptions via email.

For authors, both current and future, we expect that these changes
will improve our already high citation rankings. It will also clarify
your rights and make sure that your writing benefits you, first and
foremost. Authors interested in these benefits, should, of course,
feel free to contact us about publication!

It has been a pleasure and an honor to serve with a terrific, patient
staff this year; we hope you enjoy and learn from the results, as we
have.

Sincerely,

Luis Villa

Editor-in-Chief, STLR Volume X