Open-Access Academic Journals: Where is Legal Academia?

Slashdot | Free/Open-Access Academic Journals Growing
Wired News reports on the growing number of free/open-access academic journals. The Directory of Open Access Journals lists 1527 journals. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is launching three new open-access journals this year: PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics and PLoS Pathogens. The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Public Access Policy is also part of the movement. The traditional academic journals aren’t happy, saying that it’s unethical to accept money for publishing. But the traditional journals face their own ethical dilemmas by accepting money from advertisers.

The DOAJ listing for law journals is here. 10 American law schools list 14 titles. CLearly there is room for expansion here:)

Hackers Using BLogs to Launch Malware

Internet Week > blogs spewing worms, viruses, spyware > Hackers Use Blogs To Spread Worms, Keyloggers > April 13, 2005
While end-users can do little beyond keep safe and smart practices in mind — don’t open attachments, don’t travel to questionable links within e-mail or instant messages — Hubbard said there was plenty blog hosting services could do.

“They need to add some type of security on top,” he urged. “Anti-virus is a good start. And limit the type of files that can be uploaded, by, for example, restricting executables.”

Article seems to be part of new trend that is pushing the ‘evil blog’ meme.

Law Professor Teaching Loads @ Top 25 Schools

Conglomerate Blog: Law Professor Teaching Loads
When I entered academe just over a decade ago, almost every law school had a standard teaching load of four courses or 12 credit hours per year. In the past decade, the norm among top law schools has shifted to three courses or 10 credits per year. Although I had noticed that most of my friends were teaching lighter loads, I didn’t realize how pervasive the shift was until my Associate Dean asked me to gather information from top law schools as background for a debate about teaching loads here at Wisconsin.

The results of an informal poll of teaching loads at the top 25 law schools reveals what we’ve probably known for a long time: loads are lighter at top tier schools. Now, I don’t know exactly what this means, but it would seem easy enough to equate lighter teaching loads with better legal education.

Did I say that out loud? Of course that’s not completely true. The higher tier schools attract better students, better firms hire their grads, etc. Faculty may argue that it is the lighter load that helps the most, but I think it is a real chicken and egg problem.

Finally, it is worth taking a look at the comments section if you follow the link, there are some good ideas there.

LexisNexis: Up to 310,000 IDs Stolen

LexisNexis data on 310,000 people feared stolen – Computerworld
Data broker LexisNexis Group said today that personal information may have been stolen on 310,000 U.S. citizens, or nearly 10 times the number found in a data breach announced last month.

An investigation by the firm’s Anglo-Dutch parent, Reed Elsevier Group PLC, determined that its databases had been fraudulently breached 59 times using stolen passwords, leading to the possible theft of personal information such as addresses and Social Security numbers.

Duke to Giveaway Fewer iPods

BetaNews | Duke Modifies iPod Giveaway Program
However, the faculty will be the deciding factor this year as to which students will receive the iPods.

Reaction from students has been mixed, with many claiming the program was a waste of money, as most already owned Apple’s player. Students felt that more pressing issues, such as financial aid and campus security, should have been addressed first.

More on this here and here. The original release from Duke is here, as is the Duke iPod homepage.

WordPress Dropped From Google, Yahoo for Hiding Articles

WordPress Under Fire for Search-Engine Spamming
One of the most popular Weblog-publishing tools, WordPress, is stirring a controversy over search-engine gaming because it included thousands of articles related to popular search terms on its Web site while largely hiding them from site visitors.

Bloggers and search-engine marketers are accusing the open-source WordPress project of spamming the major search engines, while at the same time being one of the advocates in an effort to combat comment spam in blog postings.

In a nutshell, the lead developer of WordPress took money to link to articles that are invisible to regular visitors to wordpress.org, but are seen as links by crawlers. The result is that the weight given to the articles by search engines is increased by the volume of traffic to WordPress. Disclosure: this blog is powered by WordPress.