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The Future of Law Reviews

Yesterday at 3PM, representatives from most of the several Berkeley Law Reviews (including CLR, ELQ, BTLJ, BJIL, BJCL, AALJ, BJAAL, and others) met with Bob Berring and KVH from the library. The topic of the meeting was the complete digitization of law reviews (as in, there would be no more print editions). Some journals were concerned about the loss in revenue from subscriptions, but the group generally agreed that this revenue merely offset the production and print costs anyway. Subscriptions for law reviews have been going down across the board, which means reduced exposure for journals, and an accompanying loss in prestige. BB made the point that once you lose your influence, it's really hard to get it back. So the choice has become to maintain a print edition, making a diminishing amount of money and facing a loss of exposure, or bite the bullet and make the issues available for free online, raising exposure. Prompting this discussion in the first place is the "Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship", a call to action by the law libraries of the top 20 (or so) law schools.

A somewhat-related issue discussed was an enhanced online presence for the journals. ELQ has led the way here; I'm embarrassed to say that the BTLJ's website is severely lacking, though this is changing. The cost of improving BLaw's online presence is a concern for many journals, so some collaboration was discussed in order to share resources and reduce costs across the board. I suspect this goal is more secondary, but some careful planning on uniformity now would pay dividends in the future (as opposed to letting the various journals' web presence grow organically, and then try to force them into uniform molds). This isn't to say that the websites would have to look alike, or that there would be any loss of autonomy for any journals. Rather, things like design costs, IT, hosting/storage costs could be shared.

Thoughts? I love that we're abandoning the print volumes. It's shameful we haven't made this leap before. One editor raised the concern that there are "some old judges" that still prefer the print volumes, but the sad truth is that those old judges are only getting older. I suspect some traditionalists on here will be upset, and I can't deny that I take delight in forcing my technologically progressive ideals down their throats! BB mentioned that the law school was prepared to help with the transition costs, and supplement (temporarily) any lost revenue. Further, if someone absolutely demanded a print copy, we could always print one off relatively cheaply (though not in the fancy print-volume format that we use now). Also, trees will be saved. Are there any other issues that we're missing?

Full post as published by Nuts & Boalts on April 24, 2009 (boomark / email).