Cambridge University Press is a proud to embark on a unique open access (OA) partnership with the German Law Journal (GLJ) from 2019, the year of the GLJ’s 20th Volume.
The GLJ has a reputation as an innovator, as well as a leading, peer-reviewed venue for scholarship in European, international and comparative law. Since its launch in 2000 the GLJ has promoted transnational reflection in legal scholarship and practice. It is an international collaboration between Editors-in-Chief in Germany, the UK and the US, an Editorial Board responsible for peer-reviewing and developing the journal’s content and an Advisory Board based at institutions around the world. The GLJ’s Special Issues are also a hallmark of the journal’s unique approach, promoting cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary research, and often responding rapidly to topical developments such as important rulings by the European Court of Justice and the German Constitutional Court.
Key to the GLJ’s success has been its embrace of the potential of the internet for opening scholarship and access to research. The GLJ’s content has always been freely available and its openness and discoverability will be enhanced in a number of ways through the partnership with Cambridge:
- From 2019, Creative Commons licensing of all new content, thereby formally making articles free to read, copy and redistribute
- Publication of new articles in HTML as well as PDF format
- Assignment of digital object identifiers (DOIs) to new articles and those in the archive, thereby making them easier to discover and cite
- Presence on a user-focused publishing platform (Cambridge Core) designed and continually developed to improve discoverability
- Long-term preservation through CLOCKSS, which ensures that if there is a disruptive technological event the GLJ content can be made openly available via CLOCKSS participating institutions
- Benefits from Cambridge’s membership of other organisations committed to openness, publishing ethics and standards in scholarly communication (e.g. CrossRef, ORCID, Committee on Publication Ethics, JATS for Reuse)
Furthermore, both the GLJ and Cambridge are committed to exploring alternative avenues to financially support the journal without requiring authors to pay an article processing charge (APC), which most legal scholars are unable to meet.
For more information about this partnership, contact Emanuel Towfigh (Editor-in-Chief of the German Law Journal; Dean of EBS Law School, Wiesbaden, Germany) and Andrew Hyde (Cambridge University Press).