Hello all,
The new edition of the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review is out now. I meant to publish this post late last week, but between the last-minute scramble to get the issue ready (this one was supposed to be easy but turned out to involve a whole lot of corrections at a late stage), it got missed out somehow.

Anyway, if you’re into law and open source, you could do a lot worse than to check it out. You can download a PDF of the entire thing, or order a print version via Lulu (which is very cool).

I guess I’m supposed to be neutral given that I run a lot of the reviews, copyedit and put the thing together, but the highlights for me are probably Silvia Pfeiffer’s article on open standards for video codecs in HTML5, which is well-written and extremely topical at the moment, and Susannah Sheppard’s article on the potential for competition law to affect Free Software, which is something I hadn’t directly considered before.

We’ve reached an interesting stage in the development of the journal. It’s now clear that it has a high degree of FOSS community support, and we are beginning to get the same from the academic community. Much work is still to be done though. We desperately need more submissions, could do with a more streamlined workflow, and on an ongoing basis we will require a more permanent governance structure.

One of the things that has helped most in achieving visibility is being part of the OCLC OAIster database. This is replicated across lots of libraries, as part of their ‘find an eJournal’ systems. It means that more academics and students are more likely to be able to find the publication without doing a web search.

We also now deposit DOI numbers with CrossRef – this helps articles maintain their authority if they get distributed across the web or hosted by some other server (as our licence policy allows).

Today marks the release of the first issue of the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review, to which I am the primary Editorial Coordinator.

You can find the first issue table of contents here, or you can download the entire issue as a PDF file.

This is something I’ve been working on for some time, and I’m very glad to see it get out the door (so to speak) at last. I started work on it while I was an intern at Free Software Foundation Europe, and have been doing bits and pieces in my spare time ever since.

I am eternally grateful to all authors who submitted work for the first issue, to Shane Coughlan for his assistance, to NLnet and Mozilla for sponsoring it, to Tomasz Politanski for his wonderful graphic design work, and finally to the Editorial Committee for overseeing the process.

Graeme West