Legal Journals and Digital Publishing
John Joergensen, Rutgers University
Wayne Miller, Duke University School of Law
Gary Moore, Hofstra University School of Law

Wayne Miller briefly took the floor first and discussed the current progression that journals take from creation to publication and surmised that our goal should be to provide fully citable and structured free versions of law school publications on the internet.

Gary Moore was up next. He proposed immediately that student law school publications should move to exclusively online publication. There are already examples of successful non-commercial sites which allow access to full text online journal publications: Highwire Press Portal, JSTOR, etc.

Why do law schools still use print? Moore listed tenure standards, the safeguards in place at outside publishers, the common practice of journal routing in libraries, issues of prestige and publicity, and the availability of permanent archives as the most common reasons.

Moore pointed out that there are several inherent negatives for law school print publications, including cost (e.g., most law school publications operate in the red), time (e.g., production, printing, mailing, and delay of access in Hein Online), and the massive amounts of space used to store law review issues that no one ever uses.

It currently costs the Hofstra Law Review $35,000 to publish each year. This generates only $22,000 in revenue, meaning there is a net operating loss of $13,000. And that only includes the losses for one of Hofstra's publications.

Of 338 law school journals, 60% of them are currently not available online for free in any form. Why? Most do not own their own copyright. Restrictive agreements with Lexis, Westlaw, and Hein Online also contribute to this situation.

Hofstra puts its journals online. The authors own their own copyright, but the journals do retain the right to republish. This allows the school to publish online. Hofstra began with HTML articles in 1996, and eventually moved to PDF articles.

What are the benefits to digital publishing? Moore listed easy access, the ability to print on demand (no need for storage; cheap printing; selective printing), and the fact that is saves libraries a lot of money.

The Virginia Journal of Law and Technology and the Duke Law and Technology Review are the only exclusively online law journals in the market right now. Others have become defunct in the past because of a lack of consistent student interest and the fact that most lost schools don't accept digital documents for tenure consideration. This has a direct impact on these online journals. For example, in VJOLT only 1 in 5 articles were authored by tenure track faculty.

Are there costs? Sure: server costs, the cost of hiring a dedicated webmaster, and the costs of creating mirrored sites (which in Moore's estimation are essential).

But VJOLT illustrates all the benefits, too: greater worldwide exposure, lower total costs, and publication in a timely and relevant fashion.

Why should the push for digital publications happen now? Moore says there's no longer a lack of student interest and tenure standards are perhaps changing. The success of the SSRN clearinghouse shows there is interest in the medium. And don't forget, printing costs continue to rise.

Moore proposes that CALI form a consortium site for law school journals that will be free to the world. The issues that need to be resolved in order for this to work are routing, archiving, the stability of format, and consistency -- digital publications must be every bit as consistent as a print publication.

If we don't do this ourselves, Moore says a for-profit company will do it instead.

John Joergensen spoke next. He discussed the technical issues involved in preparing digital publishing for future access. The metadata must be robust, accessible, durable, and cost-effective. Growth will be unbounded which means complexity will also be unbounded. Data will grow beyond human control, but must still will be retrievable in a way that mirrors human behavior.

We must avoid proprietary and binary schemes. Also, the data must not be separated from the metadata. This is the problem with library catalogs -- the catalog metadata is separate from the work itself. This doesn't have to be the case with digital publications. Whenever possible, excess complexity must be avoided.

Joergensen proposes XML/RDF as the mechanism for building digital publications with data and metadata merged. It is a simple system that is made for metadata, but for which the actual content can be added as its own attribute for the document.

Wayne Miller returned to finish up the session. He believes that PDFs are not a long-term solution for durable digital publishing. It is extremely difficult to pull useful text from a PDF. It may be visually structured on the page, but the text has no structural units (paragraphs vs. footnotes). On Hein Online, the PDFs are images only while OCR is used to create a text version, and OCR is fairly good at what it does, but even small mistakes in character recognition can be significant.

Lexis and Westlaw, on the other hand, are high value services in the structure of their documents, but they are expensive, closed systems.

Word documents CAN be structured in a meaningful way within the data, not just a visual structure. At Duke, they are attempting to pull the valuable metadata from original Word documents. Using a commercial product called CambridgeDocs XDoc Converter, they translate this to a proprietary XML. Then another conversion afterward to DocBook schema cleans up the code. Once in this XML schema, it should be easy to create a system for converting the data to xhtml for use in a web browser.

All of this should encourage an open and accessible system. Law schools have access to the structured originals and stand directly behind the publications. Law schools, therefore, are uniquely positioned to create this system.