About the Journal

Focus and Scope

The law is undergoing deep changes due to developments in information and communication technologies. Nevertheless, it is not possible to talk about a crisis of the law in itself but, rather, about a crisis of the state sovereignty. A recovery of the traditional truthful role of the law in the social sphere is hoped for, through the creation of a law science that would be able to dominate information technology.

In this regard, i-lex journal intends to attract the interest of researchers in legal informatics, artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning and cognitive sciences applied to legal sciences, in continuous dialogue also with other sciences, applying an empirical and computational methodology.

Aspects relating to legal informatics can be investigated as criticism to the law or as a policy of law, while for in-depth studies of positive law we refer to the numerous valid journals on the subject, already present both online and printed.

History of the Journal

The i-lex journal has reached its third series of publication, with a continuity in the title and issues addressed. The transformations have mainly served to expand the structure and the Steering and Scientific Committees, accordingly to the required skills.

The first edition of the journal lasted from 2004 and 2015, on it was published on a quarterly basis.

In 2017, the journal has been relaunched with a new cultural project, focused on the deep changes in the law due to developments in information and communication technologies.

In 2020 the journal was issued with a third series, every six months, in continuity with the previous one, with a renewed editorial structure.

Starting from January 2022, i-lex is managed by the Department of Legal Sciences of the University of Bologna.

Peer Review Process

Acceptance of articles for publication is subject to double blind peer review. As part of the initial quality assessment, each article will undergo plagiarism detection through iThenticate. After this formal assessment, if positive, the submitted article will be anonymously sent to two external reviewers.

The two anonymous referents are chosen on the basis of their specific skills and research fields.

Articles are evaluated against several criteria listed in a “score form”, which meets international scientific standards for journals. By submitting an article, the author implicitly accepts the double blind peer review process. The Editorial Committee expresses an opinion both in case of approval and rejection of the article.

Publication Frequency

The publication frequency is six-monthly, with updates throughout the semester, which can be entered at any time. In addition to the ordinary issue, it is also possible to publish one or more six-monthly monographic issues.

Open access policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

It releases its articles under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

This license allows anyone to download, reuse, re-print, modify, distribute and/or copy the contributions. The works must be properly attributed to its author(s). Any derived work must be distributed under the same license. It is not necessary to ask further permissions both to author(s) or journal board, although you are kindly requested to inform the journal for every reuse of the papers.

Authors who publish on this journal maintain the copyrights.

Authors are welcome to post pre-submission versions, the original submitted version of the manuscript (preprint) and the final draft post-refereeing (postprint) on a personal website, a collaborative wiki, departmental website, social media websites, institutional repository or non-commercial subject-based repositories.

Publication Fees

The journal has neither article processing charges nor submission processing fees.

Ethics

The journal adopts the AlmaDL Journals Code of Ethics.

The code is inspired by the guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), in particular to the COPE Core Practices and its Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing.

All parties involved in the editorial process, editorial staff members, authors, reviewers must know and apply the ethical principles of that document.

Data Policy

When relevant, authors are encouraged to follow Open Science and FAIR principles by publishing the research data associated to their articles in trusted data repositories, according to the international best practices and data management guidelines.

Detailed information is reported in the AlmaDL Journals Data Policy.

Authors who are affiliated to the University of Bologna can publish their data in AMSActa, the institutional research data repository.

Indexing and Abstracting

The Journal is indexed in the following databases and search engines:

Archiving Policy

As part of AlmaDL Journals, the Journal adopts a strategy to ensure long term preservation of the published content. Please see the archiving policy of the publishing service AlmaDL Journals.

Publisher

Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna
Alma Diamond – open scholarly communication

Via Zamboni 33,
40126 - Bologna (Italy)

Ownership

Dipartimento di Scienza Giuridiche – DSG
Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna

Via Zamboni 27/29,
40126 Bologna (BO)