ROAL – Report on Open Access in Law

The current project ROAL comprises five interrelated work packages:

1. Systematic Literature Review: The literature review examines existing research to identify barriers and good practices in the implementation of Open Access in the legal sciences.
2. Publication Analysis: The data-based analysis examines long-form publication practices of the past five years at all Swiss universities with faculties of law. Based on data from institutional systems, repositories, and selected disciplinary and interdisciplinary databases. The publication analysis identifies prevalent publication types, key publishers, and levels of Open Access uptake.
3. Qualitative stakeholder interviews: The stakeholder interviews build on, extend, and complement the results of the publication analysis. The interviews include researchers at different career stages, publishers, representatives from legal practice, courts and public administration:
4. Analysis of publisher policies and Open Access initiatives in Switzerland and internationally: Publisher Policies etc. are reviewed to identify additional best practices and concrete approaches for strengthening Open Access in legal research:
5. Analysis sample contracts: Relevant sample contracts from Swiss and international publishers shall be analysed to assess how contractual frameworks facilitate or hinder Open Access publishing in the legal sciences.