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Professor of European Law at the Faculty of Law of the University of Amsterdam.
Head of the Amsterdam Centre of European Law and Governance (ACELG).
Chair in European and International Governance at the Utrecht School of Governance. In 2007 Deirdre Curtin was awarded the NWO 'Spinoza Prize', the highest scientific award in the Netherlands.
How do legal scholars circulate their research results?
By the classic method: writing articles or books. A lot is published in Dutch, on Dutch law for example, but the proportion published in English is growing. I myself write in English because I’m a native speaker and because my field, International and European law and governance, demands it. I’ve just had a book published by Oxford University Press (OUP). It’s not Open Access. OUP will be putting excerpts on the Internet, but not the whole text.
High-quality collections of conference papers and edited monographs are also publication genres that are probably used more frequently by lawyers than by other disciplines. In our field, it’s notable that the editors of a monograph add chapters themselves. Colleagues in other disciplines find that rather strange. But it’s developed that way, including internationally. It’s only collections of conference papers that are Open Access; other types of publication are generally not. I usually upload everything to my personal webpages at the University of Amsterdam and Utrecht University, including articles that have yet to be published. I started doing so quite recently. The only problem is that I don’t always have the time to keep things up to date. I do it about twice a year, with the help of my management assistant. In Utrecht – I’m a professor there as well as in Amsterdam – I’ve been doing it for longer. I also add published material – perhaps not always the publisher’s PDF, but in any case my own PDF version. Does that mean the peer-reviewed versions?
If I have them, yes. Peer review is still not standard in the field of legal studies, but it’s becoming increasingly common, particularly in political science. It ranges from comments by the editorial board to the “double blind peer review” applied by the European Law Journal, which is one of the pioneers in that regard. That Journal is published by Blackwell and it’s unfortunately not Open Access. European Integration Online Papers is Open Access, however. It circulates peer-reviewed analyses of European issues, which then often form the basis for follow-up articles by other scholars. It’s published by a consortium of universities. There’s also a growth in the various series of Open Access working papers published by universities. The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) publishes papers of that kind. They can be accessed very readily but a lot of them are not peer reviewed. Faculties can also create their own webpage where they can then publish their own working papers and conference articles. I would like to have all my own articles and conference papers on SSRN, but my management assistant has warned me that I may not be able to upload actual publications because of copyright issues. So I just upload the penultimate version. I think it’s important for the results of my research to be circulated as openly as possible. How do academic lawyers acquire prestige?
For us, it’s a matter of presentations at conferences, comments on working papers, books and articles, and the quality of dissertations. It depends. When someone is up for an appointment, it’s also important to ask the opinion of colleagues. Participation in international networks of excellence is then often an advantage, of course. For major European projects, online forums are set up, for example Connex, Connecting Excellence on European Governance. Participating in such forums and having a high profile within them contribute to your prestige. All the publications in a forum like that are Open Access. A lot of them consist of working papers, which are often not actually published in a journal. Doing so would have no added value. Quality assessment is via the comments made, and they can be extremely critical. Do citations play a role?
I myself always cite the versions that I have available. If that means an online version, then that’s what I cite. Those citations won’t always find their way into the citations statistics, but as long as they don’t play a major role in someone’s career, we are perhaps rather more relaxed than other disciplines. In the Netherlands, citation indices don’t actually play a major role in the field of law. There are a lot of reservations about it. In the United States, though, things are in fact developing in that direction, with attempts to apply the Social Sciences Citation Index to lawyers too, but it’s quite problematical. It takes place on the basis of peer-reviewed journals. It ought to be double blind peer review. Legal studies are currently in a transitional situation, particularly because of the influence of the internationalisation of the field. But it’s not always applicable as regards law. There are a lot of national topics too, and it’s logical enough to publish about them in Dutch. Those publications are not always peer reviewed, at least not in a sense of a double blind review. There are discussions within a number of bodies in the Netherlands about peer review and the classification of journals as A-journals and B-journals. That is still extremely controversial, of course. I believe that that discussion is only just getting going. Lawyers are in fact lagging behind compared to physicists, economists, and political scientists.
The picture that scholars have themselves is very variable. Personally speaking, I actually like being refereed – you get useful feedback and it improves the quality of your publication. But that approach has not yet been institutionalised in every discipline. If you are asked to transfer your copyright, do you do so?
I used to do so without thinking about it. I have the impression that I’m no longer asked to do it very often. In any event I am inclined more and more not to do so.. Are real Open Access publishers familiar in the legal field, i.e. publishers that do not charge subscription fees but that generate their income from publication fees?
No, they’re not, as far as I know. But they do exist. If you look up 'law' in the Directory of Open Access Journals, you find 92.
Well, familiarity is naturally also an indicator of status. A lot of those journals were probably only set up recently or are not very well known. Would that model be viable for lawyers , knowing that some funding bodies, for example the European Commission, are prepared to cover the publication fees?
It will be problematic if this model saves money for libraries but leaves individual scientists and scholars wondering how they can finance publication. If the costs can be included in the research budget, then it’s a good idea. It’s also logical; after all, publishing is part of your research. It would be possible in that way. Scientific funding organisations and grant givers are also becoming more aware of the importance of research results being accessible. It’s not that they often demand Open Access, but you do have to explicitly state in project proposals how open distribution of the results will take place. That applies at The Hague Institute for the Internationalisation of Law, for example. What sort of role do institutional repositories play in this kind of process?
Institutional repositories? Doesn’t ring a bell! Hang on – I do know about DARE. Is that the same thing? I have included stuff on my personal webpage that I think came from UvA DARE. To be honest, I don’t remember how that worked. I think that other people had placed copies of my articles there (or co authors) and then it was easy for me to add them. It’s not a problem as long as I can keep control of my homepage. That’s important – I want to be actively responsible for it. I also tell my colleagues that they need to do that as part of their general research culture. I’ve just set up a new institute, the Amsterdam Centre of European Law and Governance, with a new website. All our current work will be uploaded to the website. That goes without saying; you can’t avoid it any more. It could perhaps be done via a repository. I don’t know what the copyright position is. I assume that it’s OK as long as you don’t upload the actual final version. How do you find information yourself?
I make intensive use of both Google and Google Scholar. I’m in a privileged position as a scholar: I have appointments at two universities, and that gives me access to virtually everything. Without that access, things would be a nightmare. If you don’t have access, it’s extremely irritating, as in the case of Sage (a publisher, L.W.), for example. If I need to pay for access, then I don’t use it. It costs thirty dollars for a single article! In that case, I look elsewhere; I ask a colleague, for example. I think it’s a good idea for scientists and scholars to keep their personal webpages up to date with as much Open Access material as possible. By the way, access to material via the university has improved enormously over the past few years. You now have excellent access to everything irrespective of whether you work in the office or at home. But the university has to keep footing the bill, and that is becoming increasingly difficult. Is Open Access still necessary for those in the legal field?
Most of the academic lawyers that make up my target group work at a university, so they have access to a great deal of material. But politicians, journalists, and policymakers are often unable to access it. The same goes for students at vocational educational institutions, which don’t usually have those expensive subscriptions. They may not be able to access it either. Open Access continues to be necessary, systematically and for high-quality peer-reviewed material too. At the moment, we are still too dependent on ad hoc solutions and ingenuity. Interview by Leo Waaijers and Annemiek van der Kuil on 5 October 2009.
Photography by Annemiek van der Kuil. |
