Submissions
Submission Preparation Checklist
All submissions must meet the following requirements.
- The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
- The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, RTF, or WordPerfect document file format.
- Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
- The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
- The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines, which is found in About the Journal.
Free and open access to legal information in the digital age
Appropriate topics for this section include:
- Access, authorization and authentication of digital legal information
- Quality and timeliness of online legal services Licensing for digital resources
- Trends in Legal Publishing
- IPR Issues and challenges
- Best practices of information and knowledge management in libraries
Data organization and legal informatics
Appropriate topics for this section include:
- Multi-lingual legal databases
- Automatic processing of large-scale legal data on the web
- Semantic web technologies and law
- Uniform tools for legal referencing
- Social networking technologies and their implications for free access to law
Open government data and its applications
Appropriate topics for this section include:
- Role of ICT in development of comparative jurisprudence
- Government information policy
- Governance and funding models for sustainability of free acess to law
- Governance and accountability
- Challenges and barriers in free access to law in developing countries
- E-rulemaking
- E-participation
Legal Services Based on Free Access to Legal Information
Appropriate topics for this section include:
- Teaching law using internet resources
- Open legal publishing
- Economics of legal information
Reports and Reviews
JOAL welcomes occasional conference reports and reviews on websites, information services, software, and ICT tools in the legal area.
Articles should be no longer than 1.500 words. Conference reports should refer briefly to a list of topics discussed at the conference and present their main positive or negative aspects.
Sharing Opportunities and Initiatives
JOAL publishes announcements of projects and initiatives, as well as calls for expressions of interest in specific themes or aspects of open access to law.
Copyright Notice
Copyright Agreement with AuthorsAuthors submitting a paper to JOAL automatically agree to confer a limited license to JOAL if and when the manuscript is accepted for publication. This license allows JOAL to publish a manuscript in a given issue, by any means, anywhere in the world. Authors whose submissions have been accepted then have a choice of:
- Dedicating the article to the public domain. This allows anyone to make any use of the article at any time, including commercial use. A good way to do this is to use the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication Web form; see http://creativecommons.org/license/publicdomain-2?lang=en.
- Retaining some rights while allowing some use. For example, authors may decide to disallow commercial use without permission. Authors may also decide whether to allow users to make modifications (e.g.translations, adaptations) without permission. A good way to make these choices is to use a Creative Commons license.
- Go to http://creativecommons.org/license/.
- Choose and select license. Choose "generic" if you are in the U.S. and "text" for JOAL articles.
- What to do next — you can then e–mail the license html code to yourself. Do this, and then forward that e–mail to JOAL’s editors. Put your name in the subject line of the e–mail with your name and article title in the e–mail.
- Retaining full rights, including translation and reproduction rights. Authors may use the statement: © Author 2013 All Rights Reserved. Authors may choose to use their own wording to reserve copyright. If you choose to retain full copyright, please add your copyright statement to the end of the article.