Open Access in Legal Scholarship
The field of legal scholarship was comparatively late in recognising the relevance of open access for its own scientific practice. Admittedly, since the turn of the century, legal scholars have addressed the legal parameters of open access (Spindler, 2006) and have examined in dissertations the significance of copyright’s exclusionary power for the supply of scientific information (Krujatz, 2012) and in journal articles the backdoor to more open access offered by copyright law (Radtke, 2022). There are even journals, such as RuZ – Recht und Zugang, that are specifically dedicated to legal issues relating to access to cultural heritage. And between 2015 and 2024, open access was the subject of legislation in six German federal states.
However, when it comes to their own publishing practices, many legal scholars react to the topic of open access with a questioning look or a shrug of the shoulders. Others even reject it outright, which can lead to years of legal disputes. There are a variety of reasons for this – at least eight theses against open access in legal scholarship, which have since been called into question, are frequently advanced (Hamann & Hürlimann, 2019).
Open access is increasingly mandated by funders of legal science research and by universities (“top down”). In recent years, however, jurOA-Netzwerk, an informal network of legal scholars and librarians in the German-speaking area, has been working to promote open access in legal scholarship (“bottom up”). This network operates a mailing list that reports news on open access in legal scholarship. Since 2016, it has organised biennial conferences –the fifth of which took place in 2024 – that are documented on www.jurOA.de.
By contrast, the established professional societies in the field of legal scholarship have so far been reluctant to participate in the open access debate. In its Criteria for the Assessment of Scholarly Performance in the Field of Private Law, the German Association of Teachers of Private Law (Zivilrechtslehrervereinigung) defines “successful reception” as a performance criterion and designates the publication venue as an indicator for scientific quality. However, this does not appear to be linked to any statements regarding the accessibility or reusability of publications. In the guidelines for good scientific practice issued by the German Association of Teachers of Private Law (Zivilrechtslehrervereinigung) and the German Association of Teachers of Public Law (Vereinigung der deutschen Staatsrechtsrechtslehrer), there is no mention of open access. The Swiss Association of Jurists (Schweizerischer Juristenverein) has been pressured by the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences guidelines for granting financial contributions to publications to take small steps in the direction of open access.
Journals
As of October 2024, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed 860 entries under “Law“. However, this number is exaggerated, as the disciplinary assignment of journals in DOAJ is often misleading, and, on the other hand, many online law journals – both from the German-speaking area (Hamann, 2016, para 24) and the USA (Severin et al., 2020, p.16) – are not indexed. Specifically, a study conducted in 2019 found that, as of 1 August of that year, three of the 11 law journals from the German-speaking area indexed in DOAJ were assigned to the wrong subject or geographical area, while a further 39 online law journals were not included at all (Hamann, 2019, p. 87, Footnote 11, pp. 90–92). Journals are indexed in DOAJ on application only. The application procedure is very laborious, and even professional publishers – and especially many smaller (scholar-led) journals – are unable to meet all the criteria for inclusion.
Of the law journals from the German-speaking area (DE/AT/CH/LI) that are indexed in DOAJ, only one – the International Journal of Language & Law – is also a member of the Free Journal Network of even more critically curated platinum open access journals. In the case of other journals, membership is often precluded because FJN requires that member journals include a title and abstract in English for each published article. The most established law journals from the German-speaking area that are indexed in DOAJ include:
- German Law Journal (since 2000, now published in the UK)
- Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History (online since 2002)
- Ancilla Iuris: Lagen des Rechts (since 2006)
- Göttingen Journal of International Law (since 2009)
- International Journal of Language & Law (since 2012)
- Recht in Afrika / Law in Africa / Droit en Afrique (online since 2014)
- sui-generis (since 2014)
In addition, as of 31.12.2022, there were a further 10 open access law journals from the German-speaking area (Hamann, 2023, p. 416). This number increased by two in 2024, when the renowned journals RabelsZ (The Rabel Journal of Comparative and International Private Law) and ZGE (Intellectual Property Journal) were converted to open access within the framework of a pioneering subscribe-to-open (S2O) project at Mohr Siebeck. The further spread of this funding model, which was established only in 2017, means that further conversions of journals to open access can be expected.
Besides genuinely open access journals, whose articles are published under an open licence (such as a Creative Commons CC BY or CC BY-SA licence), there are numerous online law journals that (a) distribute their content primarily on the Internet (i.e. in parallel with the print version) rather than just secondarily (i.e. some time after publication of the primary print version), and (b) make the full-text versions of their articles freely accessible, that is, accessible without special access data (Hamann 2019, p. 88). In Figure 1, each online law journal in the German-speaking area that existed as of 2022 is represented by a coloured square. Three groups can be distinguished: 16 genuinely open access journals, that is, journals whose articles were published under an open licence (top left, in orange, framed in red); 15 journals with more legally restrictive licences (top right, in grey); and 28 journals with traditional rights distribution (“free to read”, bottom half of the figure, in green).
As of 01.10.2024, the Zenodo collection “Daten zum Open Access in der deutschsprachigen Rechtswissenschaft” [Data on Open Access in German-Language Legal Scholarship], the most current list of online law journals in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Lichtenstein, comprised a list of the 71 journals (incl. seven that have ceased publication). The oldest journals have been online since 1996; the years 2013/14 saw a particularly strong wave of start-ups (see Figure 2).
Because the start-ups are offset by journals that ceased publication, it is possible to determine how many online journals were in existence each year since 1996. As can be seen in Figure 3, the development curve rose steeply up to 2022. However, it also flattened in the last years of that period, and it is unclear whether this indicates a trend.
Outside the German-speaking area, the law reviews published by university presses in the United States, which are usually freely available online, constitute a flourishing eco-system of open access scholarly texts. The origins of these law reviews go back a long way – for example, to the popular repository infrastructure of the Berkeley Electronic Press (Bepress). Many of the student-edited journals in this eco-system still do not use any open access licences and can therefore be classified as gratis open access rather than libre open access.
Video about the Funding of Open Access Articles
Practical Tip
Finding Open Access Literature (in German)
Academic Blogs
In addition to scholarly journals, academic blogs increasingly also serve as serious forums for legal scholarship. Apart from the personal blogs of individual pioneers such as Ulrich Noack (“Unternehmensrechtliche Notizen” 2003–2022), multi-author blogs in particular have become established, whose content is made available mostly under different variants of CC licenses. Important examples include:
- Rechtswirklichkeit – the blog of the Berliner Arbeitskreis Rechtswirklichkeit (ISSN 2366-3022), since 2000
- Umweltrechtsblog – the blog of the Verein zur Förderung von Information für die breite Öffentlichkeit im Umweltrecht, since 2007
- Verfassungsblog – On Matters Constitutional (ISSN 2366-7044), since 2009
- HHR – Humanitarianism & Human Rights (ISSN 2199-0859), since 2013
- JuWissBlog – the blog of the association Junge Wissenschaft im Öffentlichen Recht (ISSN 2567-2754), since 2013
- Völkerrechtsblog – the blog of the Arbeitskreis junger Völkerrechtswissenschaftler (ISSN 2510-2567), since 2014
- D’Kart – an antitrust blog of the Institute for Antitrust Law (IKartR) of the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, since 2017
- Rechts|Empirie – Legal Empirics in Europe, since 2019
These blogs are used not only for science communication but increasingly also as platforms for the primary publication of short contributions with highly topical content and at the same time high academic standards.
Monographs
The Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) and the OAPEN Library list law books in various subject classifications, which cannot be searched collectively. These include (as of April 2024 for DOAB and as of October 2024 for OAPEN):
- law (2,582 titles in the DOAB, 1,416 titles in OAPEN)
- jurisprudence (235 titles in the DOAB, 229 in OAPEN)
- legal (263 titles in the DOAB, 218 in OAPEN)
- courts (3 titles in the DOAB, 19 in OAPEN)
Thus, across these categories, the two databases together list almost 5,000 legal books (multiple counts and overlooked categories cannot be ruled out). Because of the disparate categorisation, a more exact breakdown by publisher, year of publication, etc. would require a more in-depth empirical study.
The pioneers of open access monographs in the field of legal scholarship were not the established scholarly publishers but rather private individuals and societal initiatives. They include, for example, the Mannheim solicitor Thomas Fuchs, whose essays and volumes are published on DeLegibus.com (since 1998); the online portal jurawelt.com with the law series TENEA (115 monographs 2002–2008); and Mark Schweizer, who self-published his dissertation online in 2005 (he later went on to become president of the Swiss Federal Patent Court).
The first dedicated open access law publishers – at least in the German-speaking area – were probably Carl Grossmann Verlag in Germany (since 2016) and sui generis Verlag in Switzerland (since 2019). In 2024, Carl Grossmann Verlag published what was likely the first open access commentary in German jurisprudence (Boehm et al., 2024), and between 2018 and October 2024, sui generis Verlag published 55 monographs. The Verein für Recht und Digitalisierung e.V. (VRD) has been promoting open access since 2021, with two dedicated open access series under the brand digital|recht (Jüngels, 2023) – namely the “Schriften zum Immaterialgüter-, IT-, Medien-, Daten- und Wettbewerbsrecht” (20 volumes as of October 2024) and “Staat und digitale Gesellschaft” (6 volumes as of October 2024).
After the open access model was also discovered by established publishing houses, the university press Universitätsverlag Göttingen was one of the earliest and most committed publishers with a legal publishing programme. Another was Nomos-Verlag in Baden-Baden; as of October 2024, the Nomos eLibrary listed 275 open access books. More conservative publishers also have open access monographs in their portfolios. They include, for example, Mohr Siebeck, with 204 titles, and Duncker & Humblot, with 74 titles (as of October 2024). Verlag C. H. Beck, the dominant publisher of German-language law books, has so far limited itself to making a digital version of the renowned print commentary “Grundgesetz für jeden” (Basic Law for Everyone) freely available online in 2024 – albeit not under an open licence.
Open Educational Resources (OER)
Open access in the area of legal monographs is currently experiencing its greatest upswing in the context of open educational resources (OER) (see Chiofalo & Milas, 2023). In 2017, Deutsche Straftheorie, a textbook on German criminal theory, was published in open access via Refubium, the repository of Freie Universität Berlin. And in 2018, the first OER textbook on Swiss law, entitled Introduction to Swiss Law, was published by Carl Grossman Verlag. Since then, great progress in the dissemination and acceptance of OER has been made primarily by didactic projects in the area of public law.
Particularly noteworthy here are (a) the collaboratively produced textbooks of the association for legal scholarship OpenRewi on numerous topics such as administrative law, constitutional law, state organisation law, fundamental rights, asylum law, international law, and freedom of information law; and (b) Smartbook Grundrechte, a hybrid textbook with 67 instructional videos, which is co-authored by Emanuel V. Towfigh, professor of public law at EBS Law School, and Alexander Gleixner and was published in 2022 by Nomos Verlag.
Disciplinary Repositories
Disciplinary repositories have played a limited role in the field of legal scholarship to date. The few law repositories in existence include:
2Dok (pronounced "Inter-Zwei-Dok"): This open access law repository of the Specialised Information Service for International and Interdisciplinary Legal Research (Fachinformationsdienst für internationale und interdisziplinäre Rechtsforschung) at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin is open to all legal scholars. Besides scholarly publications and research data, it also archives blog posts.- SSOAR (Social Science Open Access Repository): This full-text server maintained and operated by GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences serves five “communities”, including Jurisprudence and Administrative Sciences with over 3,000 archived documents (as of October 2024).
- LawArXiv: Established with the intention of creating an open access community for legal scholarship, this preprint repository was closed after accepting 1,390 documents. It no longer accepts new submissions, and the number of archived documents has since shrunk to 160.
- Fachrepositorium zum Schweizer Recht [Disciplinary repository on Swiss law]: Run by a non-profit association in Switzerland and supported by the Faculty of Law at the University of Zurich, Repositorium.ch offers free accessibility, a semantic search functionality, and an open API. However, it does not disclose the number of archived media.
Because disciplinary repositories of legal scholarship are few and far between, general repositories such as Zenodo are often used for legal research data and publications. The Open Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) provides an overview of relevant repositories.
Video about Self-Archiving Rights
References
- Boehm, F., Euler, E., Klimpel, P., Rack, F., & Weitzmann, J. (2024). Creative Commons Public License (CCPL) – Kommentar und Handbuch für die Rechtspraxis. Carl Grossmann Verlag. https://openrewi.org/creative-commons-public-license-ccpl
- Chiofalo, V., Milas M. (2023). Die geschlossene Gesellschaft der Rechtswissenschaft: Chancen und Grenzen von Open Educational Resources, ZDRW – Zeitschrift für Didaktik der Rechtswissenschaft 10, 168–187. https://doi.org/10.5771/2196-7261-2023-2
- Hamann, H. (2016). Freier Zugang zur juristischen Fachliteratur im Spiegel der Open-Science-Bewegung. sui generis – die juristische Open-Access-Zeitschrift, 96–104. https://doi.org/10.21257/sg.28
- Hamann, H. (2019). Lizenzmodelle juristischer Internetzeitschriften: Zur vernachlässigten normativen Dimension des "Open Access". Sonderheft der RW – Zeitschrift für rechtswissenschaftliche Forschung, 85–111. https://doi.org/10.5771/9783748903659-91
- Hamann, H. (2023). Urheberrecht als Ermöglichungsinfrastruktur für Open-Access-Publikationen? ZUM – Zeitschrift für Urheber- und Medienrecht 67, 410–419. https://hanjo.1hamann.de/research/zum2023-410.pdf
- Hamann, H., & Hürlimann, D. (2019). Open Access bei der Veröffentlichung rechtswissenschaftlicher Fachliteratur – was soll das? Sonderheft der RW – Zeitschrift für rechtswissenschaftliche Forschung, 3–30. https://doi.org/10.5771/9783748903659-9
- Krujatz, S. (2012). Open Access. Der offene Zugang zu wissenschaftlichen Informationen und die ökonomische Bedeutung urheberrechtlicher Ausschlussmacht für die wissenschaftliche Informationsversorgung. Mohr Siebeck. https://www.mohrsiebeck.com/buch/open-access-9783161519987
- Radtke, T. (2022), Die Hintertür zu mehr Open Access? GRUR – Gewerblicher Rechtsschutz und Urheberrecht 124, 1562–1568. https://radtke.cc/publikationen/GRUR2022,1562.pdf
- Severin, A., Egger, M., Eve, M. P., & Hürlimann, D. (2020). Discipline-specific open access publishing practices and barriers to change: An evidence-based review. F1000Research. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.17328.2
- Spindler, G. (Ed.) (2006). Rechtliche Rahmenbedingungen von Open Access-Publikationen. Universitätsverlag Göttingen. https://doi.org/10.17875/gup2006-115
Further Reading
- Contributions by Rux, J., Hamann, H., Lauber-Rönsberg, A., & Hotz, T. (2023). In: IUM (Ed.), Open Access und das Urheberrecht – Eine komplizierte Beziehung? Symposium of the Institut für Urheber- und Medienrecht on 10.2.2023 in Munich. ZUM – Zeitschrift für Urheber- und Medienrecht 67 [Special Issue], 405–427
- Fischer, G. (2022). Im Ringen um Erkenntnis und Anerkennung: Wie Rechtswissenschaftler*innen das eigene akademische Publizieren im Zuge von Open Access sehen. RuZ – Recht und Zugang 3, 19–49. https://doi.org/10.5771/2699-1284-2022-1-19
- Euler, E. (2020). Open Access in der Wissenschaft und die Realitäten des Rechts. RuZ – Recht und Zugang 1, 56–82. https://doi.org/10.5771/2699-1284-2020-1-56
- Hamann, H., & Hürlimann, D. (Eds.). (2019). Open Access in der Rechtswissenschaft, Sonderheft der RW – Zeitschrift für rechtswissenschaftliche Forschung 2019. https://doi.org/10.5771/9783748903659
- Sandberger, G. (2017). Die Zukunft wissenschaftlichen Publizierens. Open Access und Wissenschaftsschranke. Anmerkungen zu den Kontroversen über die Weiterentwicklung des Urheberrechts. OdW – Ordnung der Wissenschaft, 2, 75–96. https://ordnungderwissenschaft.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/11_2017_02_sandberger_die-zukunft-des-wissenschaftlichen-publizierens_odw.pdf
- Symposium: Open Access Publishing and the Future of Legal Scholarship (2006). Lewis & Clark Law Review, 10(4), 733–924. https://law.lclark.edu/law_reviews/lewis_and_clark_law_review/past_issues/volume_10/number_4.php
- van Dijck, G. (2016). Legal research when relying on open access: A primer. Law and Method. https://doi.org/10.5553/REM/.00001
Content editor of this page: Prof. Dr Dr Hanjo Hamann, EBS Universität for Business and Law (Last updated: October 2024)