Due Process: The Georgetown Law Library Blog - Publishing

An Online Review of Legal Scholarship

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:33:41 -0500

Feeling overwhelmed by the plethora of legal articles and treatises to read, take a look at Jotwell.com (The Journal of Things We Like (Lots)). This brand new electronic publication, sponsored by the University of Miami School of Law, provides brief reviews of recent legal scholarship that the academic and practicing attorney-reviewers find worthy of greater dissemination. The site hopes to "celebrate works that make an original contribution" to legal scholarship.

The major areas of law currently featured include:

Administrative Law
Constitutional Law
Corporate Law
Criminal Law
Cyberlaw
Intellectual Property Law
Legal Profession
Tax Law

West releases 29 law book titles for Kindle

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:54:00 -0500

West announced yesterday that 29 of its most popular law book titles are now available for the Kindle eBook reader. Titles include Guerilla Tactics for Getting the Legal Job of Your Dreams, Contracts in a Nutshell, and Justice Scalia's Making Your Case: The Art of Persuading Judges. A complete list is available from their press release.

SPARC Issues Report on "Income Models for Supporting Open Access" for Scholarly Journals

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 10:43:00 -0500

In order to help scholarly journals provide open, free, immediate, and online access to scholarly research, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, know as SPARC, has issued a new guide, “Income models for Open Access: An overview of current practice, by Raym Crow. The guide provides information about both supply-side and demand-side income models and identifies publishers that use each.

New Search Engine for Oregon Statutes Provides Enhanced Search Features

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:05:00 -0500

The blog VoxPopuLII recently published an article about a new type of legal research product called OregonLaws.org.

The service was created by Robb Shecter, a third year law student at Lewis and Clark Law School in Oregon. OregonLaws.org provides a system to "gather, create, visualize, and mine data." Shecter explains that his database provides new ways to research Oregon statutes because it:

uses the hierarchy created by the Oregon Legislature when it designed the Oregon Revised Statutes;
uses the subjects of each statute to create a tag cloud leading the researcher to related statutes;
provides digital authentication for each document;
creates a statutory dictionary based upon all o f the defined terms in the Oregon Revised Statutes (see principal office) - https://www.oregonlaws.org/blog/2009/04/began-a-new-sub-project-oregon-legal-glossary/ new annotations.

New Publishing Project from UC Press and JSTOR

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:11:00 -0500

The University of California Press and JSTOR announced a new joint project called the Current Scholarship Program, to debut in 2011. The system is devoted to providing a cost-effective way for libraries to access scholarly journals published by UC Press. Other publishers are invited to participate.

More information is available on the JSTOR press release.

Better Access to Public Court Records

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 09:52:00 -0500

According to a press release from the company Recap, it has created a free extension for Firefox that improves the experience of using PACER, the electronic public access system for the U.S. Federal District and Bankruptcy Courts. PACER contains the docket sheets and many documents filed with the federal courts.

The press release states: "RECAP is an extension to the popular Firefox web browser that gives PACER users a hassle-free way to contribute to a free, open repository of federal court records. When a RECAP user purchases a document from PACER, the RECAP extension helps her automatically send a copy of that document to the RECAP archive. And RECAP saves its users money by notifying them when documents they’re searching for are already available for free from the public archive."

You may learn more about how the extention work directly from the Recap website.

Open Humanities Press Announces New Open Access Monograph Series

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 10:25:00 -0500

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Open Humanities Press (OHP) and the University of Michigan Library's Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO) announced a book series on literary and cultural theory. The web page for the book series explains that each book will be freely available on the web and may also be purchased in a paperback format. The contents of the the site is licensed under an open access creative commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License, which allows others to copy, distribute and adapt each work, with the condition that the reader must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

Read more about the book series through the Library's subscription to the Chronicle of Higher Education

The book series is available online the OHP website.

A New Look for West Casebooks

Wed, 20 May 2009 15:10:00 -0500

West casebooks in the American Casebook Series will soon look very different. The casebooks will change from the dark brown color to charcoal gray. Most importantly, the new cover is made from a 100% natural fiber and vegetable-based inks.

Here's an example of the new cover:

And an example of the old cover: