More and More Original Legal Scholarship Going Online

The Virginia Law Review has created an online companion publication called In Brief:

"(I)t joined the law journals at Yale, Harvard, Penn, and Michigan in a growing trend among the country’s leading law reviews to publish original scholarship on the Internet".

"Although [Editor-in-Chief Jim] Zucker claims that the Law Review didn’t feel any pressure after the Yale Law Journal published the first online companion (The Pocket Part) in October 2005, he believes that past and current Law Review managing boards possessed a uniform sense that the future of legal scholarship is online. Among other advantages, these boards recognized that online companions can truncate the publication process, which may take as much as a year from the point of an article’s submission to its publication".

Like The Pocket Part, In Brief intends to take an "intermediate approach", more than a blog with quickie posts, and more than just an extension of the print edition.

Earlier Library Boy posts about the evolution of legal scholarship include:

• Yale Law Journal "Pocket Part" (November 8, 2005): "The Pocket Part is a blog-like companion or supplement to the Yale Law Journal (the full-text of articles is available in PDF format on the Journal website)."
• Blogs Have Impact on Law Reviews (March 1, 2006): "Kevin O'Keefe at LexBlog has posted a piece entitled 'Law blogs impacting law reviews : Wall Street Journal'. It discusses how many scholars dissatisfied with the constraints of traditional law reviews have started contributing 'relevant and timely commentary' to Internet sites and blogs. O'Keefe adds that law reviews are also offering original content on the Internet and cites the example of Harvard and Yale that now offer original web-based, or blog-like, supplements to their print publications."
• Open Access Publishing and the Future of Legal Scholarship (March 31, 2006): "A few weeks ago, the Lewis and Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon hosted a conference on open access publishing in the legal field (...) All the presentations from the conference are available as podcasts. The papers themselves will be published according to open access principles."
• Harvard Blog and Legal Scholarship Conference Update (May 1, 2006): "Conference papers have been published on the Social Sciences Research Network."
• Harvard Blog and Legal Scholarship Conference Update (2) (May 11, 2006): " 'In the past few years, blogs have begun to affect the delivery of legal education, the production and dissemination of legal scholarship, and the practice of law. We are delighted that over twenty of the nation’s leading law professor bloggers have agreed to join with us for the first scholarly conference on the impact of blogs on the legal academy'. 3L Epiphany has gathered other bloggers' entries about the conference into one convenient easy-to-scan list."
• Forthcoming Article - The Lag in Open Access Law Publishing (July 16, 2006): " In the forthcoming issue of the Lewis & Clark Law Review, University of Pittsburgh School of Law professor Michael Madison has an article entitled 'The Idea of the Law Review : Scholarship, Prestige, and Open Access'... 'There is a concept of the law review that law professors have carried around in their heads, more or less consistently, for decades. I need to talk about what that is before I can talk about whether open access for law reviews is a good thing, why the reviews are reluctant to go down that path, and ultimately how to think about open access in general'."
• Yale Law Journal on the Future of Legal Scholarship (September 8, 2006): "The September 2006 issue of the Pocket Part, the online companion to the Yale Law Journal, features a series of papers about the future of legal scholarship. The papers discuss the challenges that the Internet and public blogs can pose to scholarly debate..."
• Open Access Changing How We Think About Legal Scholarship (December 18, 2006): "Carol A. Parker, the Law Library Director at the University of New Mexico School of Law, has written 'Institutional Repositories and the Principle of Open Access: Changing the Way We Think About Legal Scholarship'. The article appears in a forthcoming issue of the New Mexico Law Review but also free of charge on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) and on bePress."
• Law Journal Issue on Open Access Publishing and Legal Scholarship (January 9, 2007): "The latest issue of the Lewis & Clark Law Review is being promoted on the Lewis and Clark Law School library blog. Last year, the Portland, Oregon law school hosted a conference on open access publishing in the legal field, with all of the presentations available as podcasts. "