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Journals Policies

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Open Access Policy

Duke Law School has a longstanding commitment to making legal scholarship freely available to legal scholars as well as international and interdisciplinary audiences.  In 1998, Duke Law was the first in the country to make all the articles published in its law journals freely accessible on the Law School Web site without embargo. All articles are made freely available in the Duke Law Scholarship Repository.

Under the Journal licensing agreements, authors retain copyright to their works and grant to the Journals a defined license to publish those works.  The agreement also requires only a limited term license for exclusive publication, that can be waived. Duke Law Journals do not charge author or submission fees.

Copyright and Licensing Policy

Unless otherwise indicated, each article, essay, comment, or other work published in a Duke Law journal is copyright (c) by its author(s). Also unless otherwise indicated, the authors and the journal grant permission to reproduce and distribute for nonprofit educational uses material published in the journal, provided that: (1) in the case of copies distributed in class, students are charged no more than the cost of duplication; (2) the copied work is identified in accordance with the rules set forth in the current edition of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation; and (3) proper notice of copyright is affixed to each copy. For permission to reproduce and distribute any work published in a Duke Law journal for other purposes, contact the work's author(s). All such reproduction must identify the author(s), the Journal, the volume, the number of the first page, and the year of the work's publication in the Journal. Creative Commons and other licenses are assigned at the discretion of the author(s).

Ethics Statement

Duke Journals are guided by the principles in the Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors from Committee on Publications Ethics, 2011.

All Duke Law journals require authors to warrant that submitted work is entirely the author’s original work, contains no plagiarism and provides appropriate attribution and citations for ideas, content and quotations. Allegations of misconduct will be investigated in accordance with the COPE Best Practice Guidelines as far as is practicable.  Duke Journals, (1) take all reasonable steps to ensure confidentiality of materials submitted while under review and editorial preparation, (2) disclose funded research sources and any role in the research and publication, and (3) publish on journal website selection process and author agreement, and establish processes to communicate with authors about expectations and timelines.

Editor’s Responsibilities:
The Editor in Chief is responsible for deciding which papers will be published after review and recommendation from staff editors in accordance with the individual journal policies and procedures. Evaluation of submissions is based on the paper’s importance, originality, academic quality, validity and relevance to the journal’s scope and interests.   

See Duke Law's Model Author Agreement for more details.

Digital Archiving Policy

All Duke Law journals articles are made available via the Duke Law Scholarship Repository using the Bepress Digital Commons platform. All of our journals are enrolled in the LOCKKS program and Amazon S3 Cloud Storage are used to continuously back up all journal data.

Metadata Reuse and Repurposing Policy

With permission, Duke Law does allow the harvesting, reuse, and repurposing of Duke Law Scholarship Repository metadata. Please email: journals@law.duke.edu for questions about metadata reuse.