Open source software and a successful JISC-funded project in the School of Advanced Study, University of London have made it possible for the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) to provide a publicly available online version of Amicus Curiae, the official journal of both the Institute and its Society for Advanced Legal Studies, at: http://journals.sas.ac.uk/amicus/
Steven Whittle
Amicus Curiae is freely available online from the first issue, originally published in print in October 1997, to the pre-current issue, with delivery through the development of an Open Journal System (OJS) on the web which overlays the School's shared institutional e-repository known as SAS-Space. In 2011 issues 46 (2003) to 86 (2011) onwards were made available online as part of the SAS Open Journals project. Articles from issues 1 (1997) to 45 (2003) were added subsequently as part of ongoing work at IALS to further open access to legal information.
Amicus Curiae online in SAS Open Journal System
Amicus Curiae online features: a journal homepage on the web in HTML presenting a list of issues – showing the latest online issue and an archive of past issues; links to a series of browse views and search options across the contents (such as by issue, by author and by title); table of contents pages for each journal issue, with citation metadata, abstracts and links to individual full text articles in searchable PDF format which can be read on screen, downloaded or printed as required.
From the start, Amicus Curiae has aimed to promote scholarship and research that involves academics, the legal profession and those concerned with the administration of law. The journal carries articles on a wide variety of topics including: civil liberties, human rights, international environmental law, commercial law, European law, family law, financial regulation, white collar crime, privacy, legal services, law reform generally, and topical legal matters both inside and outside the UK. The discussion ranges from sports contracts in Italy to the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster; from reports on socio-legal lectures to commentary from war crimes conferences. The project to provide online delivery has meant that we are able to share discovery of past papers (such as those considering: the origins of the euro as European single currency; the impact of the human rights act; financial regulation following the collapse of Lehman Bros; and Scottish devolution) that have renewed relevance and topicality.
The open journal version of Amicus Curiae includes over 600 articles by more than 400 authors. Many of the articles are appearing online for the first time. Many of the authors are distinguished academic and professional legal experts in their field; judges, practising lawyers, Members of Parliament, and renowned scholars. For example, you can read:
• Cherie Booth on Proportionality and the Human Rights Act Footnote 2
• Michael Bovis on The Coming of the Euro Footnote 3
• Charles Chatterjee, and Anna Lefcovitch on Corporate social responsibility and banks Footnote 4
• Nicholas Foster describing Encounters between legal systems: recent cases concerning Islamic commercial law in secular courts Footnote 5
• James Hand and Pat Feast looking at A question of religion or orientation: Hall & Preddy v Bull and the possible effect of the Equality Act 2010 Footnote 6
• Clare Short on Handling other people's wealth – the taint of corruption Footnote 7
• Ben Summers on The Fraud Act 2006: has it had any impact? Footnote 8
• The Honourable Mr Justice Michael Tugendhat on Privacy and celebrity Footnote 9
• A series of European company law articles by Dr Frank WooldridgeFootnote 10 including The general partnership in German law and The general partnership in French law
You can also explore the legal world with the ‘Letter from …’ section of Amicus Curiae which features comment and opinion from or about: Australia, the Bahamas, Belgium, the Caribbean, Cayman Islands, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, USA, and Vietnam.
The open access initiative has given us opportunities to: unlock past work which is often revealed to have contemporary resonance and context; deliver new searching/browsing and finding/using tools which extend research value; include social networking tools to offer further dialogue on current legal topics; offer a range of portable electronic formats accessible to mobile technology; engage with a wider audience including young legal academics and their students and additionally attract a new generation of writers; and importantly to provide public access to socio-legal commentary which helps demonstrate the links and relevance of the Institute itself (and higher education in general) to the legal and wider public communities.
SAS OPEN JOURNALS PROJECT
A six-month national project running from May to October 2011 in the School of Advanced Study and funded through the campus-based publishing strand of a JISC Digital Infrastructure programme,Footnote 11 has developed a re-usable journal production and online publication system linked to the SAS open access institutional repository – helping the School and its member institutes like IALS, to raise the visibility and accessibility of academic scholarship.
The resulting integrated service provides the School with an electronic online journal publication facility, capable of creating new online journals and delivering established titles such as Amicus Curiae in a new way with the look and feel of an online commercial journal, offering a system that is able to support varying journal workflows from whole life-cycle to final PDF presentation only. The intention is to make the system available to journals produced by the School or in partnership with professional organisations and learned societies that have a close association with the School or an Institute.
The project was managed by Dr Peter Webster (SAS-Space Manager)Footnote 12 with technical development undertaken by Richard Davies and Rory McNicholl (specialists at the University of London Computer Centre where the SAS-Space e-repository has been established and hosted successfully for several years).
Work at IALS by Julian Harris (Deputy General Editor of Amicus Curiae) and Steve Whittle (IALS Information Systems Manager) focussed on the content: updating and creating metadata records, writing article abstracts and creating searchable colour PDF versions of the original print articles – to ensure that Amicus Curiae in the SAS Open Journals System developed as an important new online legal research resource. We were also involved in testing the journal management system and its capacity for handling journal production from article commissioning through to manuscript review, proofing and publication; and we participated in a feasibility study assessing such publication management facilities, using our experience with Amicus Curiae as an exemplar for other titles considering joining the SAS OJS. A detailed FAQ document was compiled to assist teams considering online publication of either an established title or a new title.
The initial project concluded with a lively workshop considering the culture and practicalities of open access journal publishing that was held on October 20th 2011 and served to launch Amicus Curiae online in the School's new Open Journals System. The participants discussed some of the key issues raised by moves into OA journal publication, such as staffing and workflow, business models, marketing advertising and publicity, and making the transition from print to web.Footnote 13
DEVELOPING AMICUS CURIAE
Amicus Curiae (“A Friend of the Court”) began publication in print as the official journal of both the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and its then newly formed Society for Advanced Legal Studies in 1997. IALS is well-known as the national resource for legal research; an academic institution based in the School of Advanced Study in the University of London but with a unique role to promote and facilitate advanced study and research in law for the benefit of persons and institutions across the UK and abroad. 1997 was a year which marked the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the IALS and appropriately that year the Institute established the Society for Advanced Legal Studies (SALS), building on our earlier Friends organisation and aiming to link our extensive legal user communities: academic lawyers, barristers, government lawyers, law students, members of the judiciary, solicitors and other legal practitioners. Since then, SALS has assisted the Institute in conducting cross sector activities including a lecture series, working groups, consultative reports and production of the journal.Footnote 14
The journal's title was chosen to emphasize the Institute's desire to stimulate and draw upon legal issues of cross sector interest and opinion, bringing together the views and concerns of legal academics and professionals with articles that speak to the profession, the judiciary, the civil service, legal scholars and to their students. To this day Amicus Curiae acts as an important vehicle carrying details of IALS news stories and our calendar of events and more especially raising and exploring topics which can then be taken further by the Institute and our communities of legal researchers across the UK and around the world.
The journal is managed within IALS by a General Editor (Professor Barry Rider) and the Deputy General Editor, Julian Harris, an Associate Research Fellow at the IALS. Julian is responsible for the editorial production of Amicus Curiae. His role includes liaison matters, editing articles and attending selected lectures. A maintained panel of specialist Consultant Editors in over 40 legal disciplines and external referrees and additionally editorial advisors drawn from the Advisory Council of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and Advisory Council of the Society for Advanced Legal Studies are available to assist with quality assurance and peer review, carrying out assessments of selected pieces as appropriate. In addition, a number of the articles commissioned are selected from public lectures given at the IALS, and the authors concerned are asked to take account of comments and criticisms raised by attendees before submitting their manuscripts.Footnote 15
We believe that the strengths of Amicus Curiae derive from the quality of its contributors and breadth of coverage – so the journal continues to be able to offer information and opinions, provide a forum for debate, and publish influential and informative articles raising and exploring legal issues which remain topical and in many cases have assumed increased significance over time. The legal subject scope, reflecting the work of the Institute, includes UK, EU, foreign, comparative and international law.
Amicus Curiae is currently published four times a year in print format by IALS and is issued free of charge to members of SALS and is also available on annual subscription and will continue to be published in print (and later online).
TRANSITIONS FROM PRINT TO WEB
Issues and benefits from the OJS project
The online publication of Amicus Curiae has evolved over several years, beginning with simple contents listings and selected articles on the IALS website, increasing through the development of the Amicus Curiae collection of articles in PDF format in the SAS-Space repository and now achieving a full online journal presentation through the SAS Open Journals System.Footnote 16
A first step in open access publication of Amicus Curiae was taken a few years ago with the creation of an archive of past issues from 2003 onwards made freely available on the IALS website through a series of basic HTML pages linked to individual article records with PDF download options published online via the IALS sections of SAS-Space which uses the Eprints open source repository software.Footnote 17
The latest developments, through the SAS Open Journals System project have taken us to the next stage and level of public delivery. Preconditions to achieving a successful transition (in our case the continuity of print publication with the addition of online publication) included the mobilisation of editorial team support, management support, and technical support.
SAS Open Journals is an installation of the open source Open Journal System produced by the Public Knowledge Project,Footnote 18 a non-profit collaborative initiative involving Stanford University, Simon Fraser University, University of British Columbia, University of California, and the University of Pittsburgh. As we have found, the PKP OJS provides a full range of features supporting a whole life-cycle manuscript workflow through to delivery of the finished publication through a customisable web interface.
With open source solutions like this, the software itself comes without charge and a key investment is in the enabling skills and technical know-how involved in using and improving the programme and getting the best of the application as appropriate to the service purpose and user needs.
Richard and Rory, our colleagues at the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC), sharing expertise and enthusiasm, worked particularly on the integration of the PKP OJS with Eprints. Their tasks included the initial installation, configuration and testing of the application; loading the original metadata created in SAS-Space into SAS Open Journals; and modification of the SWORD plugin for deposit to repositories, so SAS Open journals could reference digital objects (our article PDFs) which may have been created in the local OJS but later deposited and held in our Eprints repository. As a result SAS Open Journals is able to use both the PKP OJS interface and employ the digital object and metadata management features and preservation capabilities of the SAS-Space Eprints implementation.
At IALS we reviewed, renewed and enhanced the metadata originally created for those articles from 2003 onwards which had been included in the repository. In particular article abstracts were written and revised and some ‘missing’ items, shorter editorial pieces carrying information and opinion not previously deposited in SAS-Space, were added. All the original black and white image-based scans were replaced with colour OCR-based PDFs providing a layer for enhanced searchability Clean-up work was done to ensure filename consistency and author name consistency. In this project the digitisation elements were outsourced to Hollingworth and MossFootnote 19 who have an established, productive relationship with IALS and several institutes in the School.
At an early stage in the project, we needed to address issues of sustainability. We weighed the balance of risks involved in increasing impact through free delivery without endangering subscriptions and making publication unviable. It was important to be prepared and able to adjust the business model behind the journal. We chose an approach that includes a brief embargo period, protecting the latest print issue while providing a substantive online archive; aiming to extend delivery without eliminating a crucial market.
This is still a matter for trial and review which may in turn feed into a revision of our model for Amicus Curiae either in the print publishing pattern or in potential variation to the Society's membership subscription and journal receipt options, particularly when a majority of production costs arise from paper, printing and distribution.
We are intending to keep the embargo of at least one issue in the Open Journal System so the current issue of Amicus Curiae will always be available to subscribers earlier than the public online version. An alternative model, adopted by others involved in open access publication, offers temporary free access to the latest issue only (inverting the model adopted currently by Amicus) so the most recent issue is free and access to the archive is chargeable.
We are also looking at the possibility of offering subscribers and members of SALS the chance to receive the current issue electronically at time of print publication. That could be a PDF copy emailed to a contact address or made available to pick-up from login to a SALS membership area on the IALS website or, if there is sufficient demand, IP address recognised access. We have already received expressions of interest in this route and are investigating ways to support and sustain such a service.
In making our transition to additional, open web access we considered issues of perceived value and recognition associated with free as opposed to charged, services. For instance, our academic contributors are able to see that their results in research assessment exercises, which can affect funding and status, may benefit from increased visibility and reverberation in leading and well-regarded publications. To this end we have acted to improve ‘sight lines’ as elements of open access delivery.
We have registered with the British Library for an eISSN for Amicus Curiae online (needed in addition to the established ISSN as print publication is continuing http://forms.bl.uk/bibliographic/index.aspx) and submitted a registration application to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) http://www.doaj.org/ – helping to make content even more discoverable and to encourage authors concerned about impact and reception of free online publication. There is a waiting list for DOAJ inclusion (which can only be a positive sign for the expansion in open access) but success there, will in turn mean a title is picked up by other services such as EBSCO http://www.ebsco.com/ and JournalTOCs http://www.journaltocs.hw.ac.uk/.
Our project also identified and addressed rights and permissions matters, including retrospective permissions relating to the early articles published in the original print journal. This means that Amicus Curiae adopted an approach based on Creative Commons licensing.Footnote 20 Articles are included on the basis of a non-exclusive licence to publish online and the Creative Commons ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives CC BY-NC-ND’ user licence. Contributors retain author copyright in their work but are asked to grant two licences. One is an irrevocable, non-exclusive royalty-free right to licence to the School of Advanced Study of the University of London, enabling us to reproduce the item in any format including electronic formats, throughout the world for educational, research, and scientific non-profit uses during the full term of copyright, including renewals and extensions. The other licence benefits those making use of items stored in the open journal system or the e-repository, allowing them to download works and share them with others as long as they attribute the original and link back to the entry in SAS OJS or SAS-Space. They can't change the original work in any way or exploit it commercially.
IALS is very grateful to the original publishers of the earlier issues of Amicus Curiae (CCH New Law and Sweet & Maxwell Ltd.) for their agreement to our open access initiative; and to all the authors (who retain their copyright) for their support in developing the new publicly available resource for legal researchers. From issue 46 onwards Amicus Curiae was published entirely by the Institute itself.
As a further step in developing the service we plan to extend the facilities for including links to additional related materials. Taking one back issue of Amicus Curiae as an example; typically the authors of articles in issue 33 (2001)Footnote 21 refer to pieces of legislation or case law to illustrate their discussion or as the main subject of detailed analysis in their article. The increased functionality offered by the Open Journal System through a supplementary material link means we can offer the relevant links to primary legal materials and supporting information held elsewhere on the web. So Michael Blair's Anatomy of a new act will benefit from links to the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 from BAILII (http://www.bailii.org/uk/legis/num_act/2000/ukpga_20000008_en_1.html) and http://legislation.gov.uk; Michael Lobban's The common law mind in the age of Sir Edward Coke will be enhanced by access to digital copies of Coke's works and/or biography available on Google books http://books.google.com/ or Open Library http://openlibrary.org/; Richard Wish's Unilateral acts and the concept of agreement in Article 81(1) of the EC Treaty: the Court of First Instance in Bayer v Adalat will link to particular EC treaty texts and EC case law on http://eur-lex.europa.eu/en/index.htm and the Profile of the American Society of Comparative Law will feature live interaction with the ASCL website http://www.comparativelaw.org/.
USER ENGAGEMENTS AND INTERACTIONS
Our integrated Open Journal and e-repository systems feature increasingly important social networking and user interaction capabilities (making them spaces for provocations and invitation) helping to increase immediacy, to show popular and scholarly relevance and build an online community around the content.
SNNEP (a social networking extensions plugin for Eprints) developed by Rory McNicholl at ULCC) displays user-generated content added at article-level in the SAS-Space e-repository in the OJS interface; so shared comments, user tags and personal notes are all available, offering opportunities for further discussion on the latest legal topics and helping editors with knowing their readership and profiling the potential audience.
Readers of Amicus Curiae online can subscribe freely to RSS feed options and receive updates derived from their own preferences and self-selected search criteria. The ‘AddThis’ toolbar has also been included on each individual article page. http://www.addthis.com/ to help users in compiling a personal bibliography, in recording a research trail and in making further recommendation.
The social networking facilities reaching a global audience will help engage different demographics of young legal academics, attracting new contribution through shared research opportunities, personal research logs and community dialogue. Appropriately the experience and findings of the project itself have been recorded and shared through a Blog http://sasopenjournals.blogspot.co.uk/ and our project reports are published in SAS-Space.
As our work with the open source applications continues we intend to investigate further the underlying production system capabilities and assess ways in which they might assist both the print and online publication of Amicus Curiae. We have already enabled author submission of manuscripts through the online service. We can see how the application might aid preplanning of future issues, supporting the collection, rearrangement and assembly of material ahead of time for specially themed issues and provide the potential for online only content. We will see how editors and reviewers might best handle submission in an online environment, mapping real activity and practice to the system options, account roles and permissions while retaining the benefits of personal contact between editor, reviewer and authors and essential room for flexibility (like the rare late submission).
OTHER DEVELOPMENTS IN THE SAS-SPACE OPEN ACCESS REPOSITORY
As a scholarly institutional open access repository built on the Eprints application and community of shared expertise, SAS-Space forms an increasingly important part of the School's publishing programme and is recognised as an element of core activity in SAS; making research outputs available from across the Institutes and ensuring the widest possible dissemination. SAS-Space is well-represented within the SHERPA-LEAP community of University of London repositories http://www.sherpa-leap.ac.uk/ formulating best practice, stimulating software development and defining digital preservation aims and standards.
In addition to creating the Amicus Curiae collection in SAS-Space, the Institute is a leading contributor of other collections of papers, reports and legal research materials to the School of Advanced Study's institutional repository http://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/view/divisions/ials.html. Collections in the IALS section contain work by Institute academic and library staff, students, visiting fellows and associated legal scholars. This material is made available for use on an attribution-non-commercial-share alike creative commons licence, with the aim of promoting usability and accessibility for researchers. A recent IALS repository project has involved making selected papers from past W. G. Hart Legal workshops freely available in as a new collection on SAS-Space http://sas-space.sas.ac.uk/view/collections/ials-hart.html.
The W. G. Hart Legal Workshop is a major annual legal research event organised and hosted by the Institute. Over the years this eponymous workshop series has focused on a wide range of comparative and international legal issues and topical interest.
W G Hart Legal Workshop papers in the IALS Collections on SAS-Space
So far we have published, as a new collection in our e-repository, selected papers (as agreed retrospectively by the authors) from the W. G. Hart Legal Workshops organised by IALS in 2007, 2008 and 2009. We wanted to make available these important contributions to legal research, which in some cases have not since reached a wider audience. Very helpfully, items included in SAS-Space are picked up by the Directory of Open Access Repositories, openDOAR http://www.opendoar.org/ which has international coverage and reach.
Again we are utilising a modest embargo period – in this case for each current year and pre-current year of the workshop – to allow all the possibilities of print publication to be fully explored. The system can hold the papers and their records in readiness but does not free them for public use until after a designated time has elapsed. As with Amicus Curiae we want to test the options and be sure we have the balance right on the embargo period so both print and in due course, online open access publication in SAS-Space are mutually beneficial; so the workshop continues to attract leading academic directors, speakers and delegates, who are able to see proven benefits of carefully managed open access delivery.
The papers we deposit in SAS-Space are the versions prepared and submitted for the workshops. For practical reasons we seek and secure author permissions for non-exclusive use at the time of each workshop. In formulating this policy we considered how far online scholarly repository publication could and should facilitate corrections after publication, particularly where there is a gap between the original workshop presentation and the public appearance in the repository.
We are able to advise authors that many publishers are aware of the value of open access institutional e-repositories and work with the idea of depositing pre-print versions of an article or paper. We also let them know that the position of a given publisher can be checked on the SHERPA-LEAP RoMEO databaseFootnote 22 or directly on the publisher's own website ahead of any print publication contract discussions.
We want to build on the success of the workshop and ensure that print publication opportunities are not limited by the eventual appearance in our e-repository. The aim is to share legal thought and scholarship and provide a further means of publication, academic dialogue and impact for individual scholars and workshop speakers and also assist the Institute in extending its national research facilitation role and achieve increased recognition and support for this key annual event.
FACILITATING GLOBAL COLLABORATION
The development of Amicus Curiae as an open access journal and the collections of freely available legal research papers in SAS-Space provide us with further opportunities for international collaboration and will help us make important contributions to global services and legal information initiatives.
In 2011 the IALS was elected as a member of the worldwide Free Access to Law Movement http://www.falm.info/ and has participated in the work of FALM for some years through assisting in the foundation of the British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) http://www.bailii.org/, and hosting BAILII since its establishment in London. FALM is an alliance of over 30 institutes and organisations that share an open access information ethic and subscribe to the Declaration on Free Access to Law and collaborate on the free provision of legal information and on global policy issues.
Member organisations are based in countries and regions such as Australia, Canada, Cyprus Hong Kong, India, Italy, Pacific islands, Philippines, Southern Africa, Uganda and the USA.
IALS is also the London contact point for the Commonwealth Legal Information Institute (CommonLII) http://www.commonlii.org/ and hosts a CommonLII Fellowship. Professor Graham Greenleaf AM of the University of New South Wales and a co-founder of the Australasian Legal Information Institute, the first of its kind, was a visiting fellow at IALS during 2011/2012 as inaugural CommonLII Fellow working to develop the Commonwealth Legal Information Institute.
Professor Greenleaf delivered a lecture at IALS on the evening of Tuesday 17 January 2012Footnote 23 reaffirming the world-wide case for full free access to law as a liberty in support of liberty, explaining what ‘full free access’ really means (such as republication by non-state parties of government sources, free from monopolies of authoritativeness), what might be entailed in achieving it (through the work of the Legal Information Institutes and others) and how best it might be safeguarded (potentially through international reciprocity and agreement derived from a Hague conference convention).
With such principles in mind, IALS is keen to undertake an effective and appropriate role in helping to take a new collaborative international project forward and make a proposed European Legal Information Institute (EuroLII) service a reality. As a practical start we are investigating the possibilities of republication options and XML feeds of appropriate articles from Amicus Curiae to the established WorldLII and evolving EuroLII services. The complexity of EU law and Member State laws and a lack of public familiarity with relevant materials may benefit from such commentary and explanatory material – setting the context of the legal systems and for the application of materials contained in EuroLII and helping engage and inform EuroLII users.
OPPORTUNITIES FOR INNOVATIVE PUBLISHING
The Amicus Curiae web services in SAS OJS and SAS-Space and the collection of articles from W. G. Hart Legal Workshops join a portfolio of open access online resources and legal research tools from the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. Through the ongoing work of IALS Information Projects, the Institute is committed to extending the reach of digital provision of legal information and maximise access to key or hard-to-find information to facilitate legal research, public understanding, and promote justice and the rule of law.
For Amicus Curiae we plan to maintain both a print and web-based presence as complementary service options, recognising that the full range of UK, foreign, international and comparative legal information is still very much a hybrid environment of print and digital resources.
Responses to the additional services and content have been very encouraging with over 1000 downloads per month of articles from Amicus Curiae from SAS-Space. The systems collect valuable usage data and user responses that can assist editorial considerations, and help improve the contents of the journal. At time of writing, the latest monthly top 10 for Amicus Curiae shows an encouraging mix of interest in both recent and earlier articles, with original publication dates ranging from 2004 to 2011.
Open access projects are always likely to need to reconcile economic concerns and public policy responsibilities. The opportunities for collaboration and practical content contribution which our initiatives offer, can play a part in helping to achieve the necessary balance and make a useful difference. The inherent flexibility of open access solutions can help minimise economic risk and provide freedom to experiment in forms, ideas and approaches. The resulting services can facilitate smart feeds, republication and reuse, aid the preservation of evolving iterations and provide multiple contexts which better meet a broader audience and more variant research needs.
Future plans for SAS-Space are focussing on both user-repository and user-user interactions. Work is currently in progress to implement the MePrints pluginFootnote 24 facility on the SAS Eprints repository which would give contributors a private homepage where they could receive information about deposits, papers they have authored, download statistics and other data useful to their research assessment returns and help them promote their work and general profile.
IALS is particularly interested in exploring the possibilities of mobile technology and delivery in popular e-publishing formats and we will be looking at the facility that the Open Journals System might offer editors to create XML or HTML-based versions of articles for automatic web and Epub/E-book versions to complement the established searchable PDF versions. As ever we will seek to provide options that are appropriate to law, to the work of legal researchers and the progress of legal education. Such developments can only help ensure that, for trending law topics and informed legal research, our journal becomes the Amicus optimus (“best friend”) you could have.
