Kent Law School [1] in the UK has launched the inaugural issue of a new open access journal, feminists@law [2]. This from the journal description on the home page:
feminists@law is a peer-reviewed online journal which aims to publish critical, interdisciplinary, theoretically engaged scholarship that extends feminist debates and analyses relating to law and justice (broadly conceived). It has a particular interest in critical and theoretical approaches and perspectives that draw upon postcolonial, transnational and poststructuralist work. The journal publishes material in a range of print and multimedia formats and in English and other languages. The journal is committed to an international perspective, to the promotion of feminist work in all areas of law and justice, and to making that work widely available through open access publishing.
The contents of Vol. 1, No. 1 fall into three areas:
- Feminism and Open Access, an examination of “a relational approach to copyright in the academy,” (this by three York University profs, one of whom, Carys Craig, is a former colleague of mine at Osgoode);
- Reflections on ‘Beyond Accommodation,’ three articles looking at where feminism has been; and
- eleven shorter pieces gathered under the rubric Current and Future Agendas for Feminist Legal Studies.
This is a thoroughly up-to-date example of a law journal: not only is is open access (Creative Commons Attribution 3 License [3]), but all articles are available in three formats, Word .doc, PDF, and HTML; there’s a sidebar, Happenings, that allows for regular updates of interest to scholars; and there are videos [4] of a roundtable discussion of the past, present and future of feminist scholarship. Of course, the journal offers RSS [5], a Twitter account @feministsatlaw [6], and a Facebook page [7] as well.