It has happened again; once more, v-Lex has changed hands, this time from Oakley Capital to the Canadian software company, Clio (Themis Solutions Inc.), for around US$1bn. Clio/Themis sits within the portfolio of New Enterprise Associates (NEA) venture capital firm, which previously shared in the funding of Ravel Law. Ravel, in 2017, was sold to RELX, which might indicate the future directional path of Clio/v-Lex. Harvey AI had been linked to rumours that it considered acquiring the much more established competitor, v-Lex, the alleged purpose being for the former to exploit the latter, to assist growth. That notion . . . [more]

Welcome to my 100th and final column for Slaw. It all started innocently enough at the outset of 2008 when the late Simon Fodden, innovative founder of this venue, invited me to contribute a column on scholarly publishing issues. I first wrote of how the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) was now requiring those it funded to make the resulting research freely available, if after a 12-month delay (to appease publisher pushback). I called it at the time a “tipping point” in the growing efforts to secure public or open access to all research worldwide.

Now, some seventeen . . . [more]

It is normally frowned upon to suggest that experiences from the past might be indicators of outcomes in the future. The problem is that invariably to follow that line runs a significant risk of naivety, for want of understanding that history does indeed frequently repeat itself, and humans are inclined to repeat their own mistakes, as they search to replicate their successes from the past. It was, therefore, noteworthy that the global US-based law firm, Cleary Gottlieb, has acquired the small London-based AI-focused startup, Springbok AI, the latter described in The Lawyer as “a challenger to the Harvey . . . [more]

The number one issue facing scholarly publishing today is research integrity. The crisis is associated with paper mills selling authorships to fabricated papers; reviewer cabals colluding with special issue guest editors; predatory journals, sans reviewers and editors, acting as auto-publish clubs; and papers rife with image and data manipulation. In response, publishers and editors are scrambling to retract thousands of corrupted papers, close complicit journals, and cease special issues. The publish-or-perish culture, often backed by cash incentives (now banned in China), can be blamed, as can publishers pushing papers through to capture open access fees. It all reflects how, in . . . [more]

I have the impression, no more than that, and in no sense verifiable nor measurable, that among the eminent experts and commentators, there seems to exist a possibly small number of self-interested and obsessive nerds, primarily in North America, on the periphery of that part of the law publishing industry which actually has paying customers, who spend much of their time pretentiously telling us that the major players are about to go under and be overtaken by minnows. I understand that similar but different paranoia extends also to legal practice; it seems, to me at least, to be . . . [more]

This is a case of not closing the barn door after the horse is out, to use a pre-twentieth-century expression for a twenty-first-century issue. But, more precisely, I want to argue for propping the barn door open to enable the rest of the horses to run free after a good number have been questionably sold off.

Let me explain. Think of those sold-off horses as the research studies that at least three major research publishers – Taylor & Francis, Wiley, and Oxford University Press with more deals pending – have rented out to AI giants, such as Microsoft, for the . . . [more]

In the world of research, journal publishers are occasionally compelled to “retract” a published article. It may contain errors that posting a “correction” won’t sufficiently address, may utilize falsified data, may have been published elsewhere, may have been plagiarized, or may have been otherwise compromised. Yet the retracted paper does not disappear. It retains its place in the journal, while being stamped “Retracted” on page after page, along with an explanation. This reflects how the act of publication, when it comes to research, constitutes the official record. Publication is “performative,” according to speech act theory, like naming a ship . . . [more]

It may seem somewhat removed and distant from the narrow world of legal information publishing, but I was concerned to read that Williams Lea, within which sits TSO (formerly The Stationery Office in the UK) has been sold to R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company (RRD), in which Chatham Asset Management has a controlling stake; RRD’s interest in acquiring TSO appears to go back many years. TSO is the result of the then Conservative Government’s privatisation of HMSO, which, prior to that, was similar in character to the GPO in the USA and equivalent official printing and publishing . . . [more]

Regular readers of this column (thank you) will recognize copyright reform is a common interest of mine, especially as such reform might lead to greater public access to research. Still, I only took up the copyright torch after a very loose consensus – among researchers, publishers, librarians and funders – around open access’ scientific value began to emerge. Such consensus has been called the iron law of copyright reform. Could such reform address, I dared to hope, reduce such impediments to open access as publishers dragging their heels, while holding on to subscription arrangements, even as they introduced rampant price . . . [more]

[Une version française suit]

On January 13, 2000, the Supreme Court of Canada issued its landmark decision in Arsenault-Cameron v. Prince Edward Island, 2000 SCC 1 (CanLII), [2000] 1 SCR 3, a case significant for its impact on minority language educational rights in Canada. This decision was also the Court’s first to adopt the Neutral Citation Standard for Case Law, a pivotal innovation introduced in 1999 by the Canadian Citation Committee. Neutral citations have since become a cornerstone of Canadian legal practice, providing a standardized, vendor-neutral method for referring to judicial decisions, as reported many times here . . . [more]

Whether or not there is truth in the rumours that upstart, Harvey, has been keen to acquire the much-admired vLex, it was interesting to read the analysis by Isha Marathe, of Legaltech News, on the topic, as reported via legal market heroes, House of Butter. The HoB report concludes, “If Harvey wants to make true on the third item in its tech offerings—workflow automation; an AI assistant, and legal research—it’s going to have to find the data. The story of Harvey and vLex underscores the market barriers to a startup becoming a substantial legal research mainstay . . . [more]

The week of October 7th this year was quite something for Artificial Intelligence (AI). It was the object of two consecutive Nobel Prizes, awarded just days apart. The first, in Physics, went to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton (a British Canadian) for laying the foundations of machine learning. The second in Chemistry, won by Demis Hassabis, John Jumper, and David Baker, was for utilizing AI to predict millions of intricate protein structures that are key to understanding molecular interactions. In stark contrast to this double triumph are some 20 copyright infringement suits filed against OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, . . . [more]