Increasing the academic value and recognition of the European Law Blog.
Open Research objectives/practices
Legal blogs are a valuable source of information for students and researchers who wish to follow current events and developments in the law. Publications with legal blogs, however, may sometimes feel like a second-rate, informal, publication format that yields limited reward for researchers, especially when compared with established and formal academic journals. We feel that this sentiment does not accurately reflect the value and benefits that legal blogs bring to timely and open research. Oftentimes, blog posts receive greater public attention that analyses in journal articles, and blogging may increase visibility of both early-career and more established researchers in a fast-paced field such as EU law. Through the recent redesign and changes of the European Law Blog (ELB), we have formalised the governance, improved the appearance and assigned an open-access license to all contributions on the blog, to the effect that this will help establish it as a high-quality publication outlet dealing with recent and ongoing developments in EU law.
Introduction
Legal blogs offer quick and easy-to-access to insights on legal developments. The European Law Blog is one of the relevant blogs on the issue of EU law and the case law of the Court of Justice. Recently, the editorial team of which the applicant is a member have discussed ways to formalise and professionalise the blog. To this end, we have founded a non-profit foundation called Stichting European Law Blog, through which we were able to acquire financial support via the Diamond Open Access Fund at the University van Amsterdam. This funding was used to redesign the appearance of the blog, and to assign a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to each publication and to ensure open-access publishing by adopting a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY).
Motivation
The ELB has always been open access. With the recent changes, however, we have tried to turn the blog into a publication outlet that is attractive for both authors and readers. Ultimately, these changes were intended to establish the blog as a serious publication outlet, both for early-career researchers and more experienced professionals. As deliverable, the relaunch of the new website at the start of the academic year 2024/25. We also announced a ELB bloggers’ prize, aimed at early-career researchers, to give the relaunch of the blog a boost in visibility.
Lessons learned
We have learned that the redesign and changes to the ELB are a community effort and should be understood as such. We had to reach out to all authors, current and past, to ask for their permission to re-publish previous post under the CC BY license. This was extremely time consuming, but indicated to us that, over the years, the ELB has built a community of authors dedicated to timely and open research and that many authors got back to us to commend on the re-design and formalization plans. Nonetheless, the relaunch caused a lot of technical difficulties, such as broken hyperlinks to existing contributions and non-synchronization on common search engines, which we managed to only partially solve. For a non-profit blog that is run by an editorial team of volunteers, this was difficult to manage, and we had to hire a student assistant to help out with some of the technical difficulties we encountered. As a lesson learned, this indicates that we underestimated the time and efforts that the relaunch required.
URLs, references and further information
| Last modified: | 11 November 2024 1.25 p.m. |