This Open Access week, we profile the German Law Journal (GLJ), which has been a pioneer of open scholarly publishing in law since its foundation in 2000.

The GLJ and Cambridge embarked upon a unique, experimental publishing partnership in 2019 and this month saw the launch of new initiatives that show how the Journal is exploring the open future on several fronts. These include not only the Open Access dissemination of peer-reviewed legal scholarship on issues of pressing and global importance, but also the use of videos and podcasts to communicate and reflect upon these insights, and a commitment to a business model that supports open scholarship without excluding authors on the basis of funding or affiliation.

Starting with the possibilities offered by new digital formats, Emanuel Towfigh (GLJ Editor-in-Chief) and Nora Markard (of the GLJ Editorial Board) present two types of videos – GLJSpecials and GLJShorts – as an extension of GLJ’s emphasis on accessibility of innovative scholarship and its responsiveness to important judgements and events, which have been a hallmark of its special, thematic issues over the years.

GLJ Specials and GLJ Shorts have just been made available for two GLJ Issues: the just-published 21.7, on Social Legal Studies in Germany and the UK: Theory and Methods, and the issue curated for 21.3 on Border Justice: Migration and Accountability for Human Rights Violations. The GLJ Specials provide an excellent way into these collections of articles: they are discussions with the Guest Editors, who comment on the topical nature of the issue, the insights the articles offer, and the challenges of bringing this knowledge together. 

The GLJ Shorts, which present selected articles from these issues in a nutshell, are available through the GLJ YouTube channel, and podcast versions of all the videos can be found on all the major platforms. We invite you to also read this blog from the co-founding EIC, Russell Miller, on how these new digital initiatives are critical and informed encounters with research in the best scholarly tradition of the GLJ.

How are CUP and the GLJ collaborating to support this open knowledge?

The From the Headquarters article from Russell Miller, Emanuel Towfigh and Andrew Hyde (Cambridge University Press) gives the background to how Cambridge and the GLJ joined forces, and how we are experimenting with a mixed financial models to support this collaboration – the ethos of which can be summarised in the epithet no barrier to access, no barrier to contribute.

Nonetheless, even the production of a student-edited online-only journal such as GLJ generates some cost. To help sustain our activities, the GLJ will shortly be introducing an entirely voluntary article processing charge (V-APC) of £1000, which gives those GLJ authors who are in receipt of grant and institutional Open Access funding the option of using these funds to contribute to the cost of publishing in the Journal.

Combined Cambridge’s Read & Publish agreements with national library consortia and university systems, as well as other options to sponsor and support the GLJ, this promises to provide a non-exclusionary foundation for the GLJ’s innovative activity whilst honoring its commitment to remaining open-access to both readers and contributors.