International Journal of Communications Law & Policy

EDITORS' STATEMENT - ISSUE 5

This fifth issue of the IJCLP is an occasion for reflection on our purposes, readership and contributors. We set out to re-engineer the law journal both in form and purpose: to provide an interdisciplinary and international approach, harnessing Internet technology to disseminate authors' copyrighted material to as broad an audience as would find it stimulating and useful. We deliberately set out an eclectic approach, not by deliberate academic obscuritanism, but in order to provide a combination of theoretical and substantive work, positivist and normative approaches, and thus to offer both academic and practitioner the perspective offered by the other's expertise.
Have we succeeded? That is for you to judge. In the internationalisation of reader and author, however, the statistics speak for themselves: 41 articles, works-in-progress, opinions, comments and case notes:

- 8 German
- 8 other West and North European
- 7 East and South European
- 7 US
- 5 UK
- 2 Canadian
- 2 Asian
- 1 African
- 1 Australasian.

In the development of the journal, the addition of a US editor (Dr Beth Noveck from Yale's Information Society Project) has balanced the European contingent, and reduced any potential reliance on the European academic community. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that three of the editors currently live in the US, the journal has avoided absolute author predominance of either its 'home' market, western Europe, or the Internet's 'home' market, the USA.
The production values of the journal are often favorably commented upon. This is to the credit of the Munster production team based at the Institute for Information, Telecommunication and Media Law (ITM) directed by Prof. Dr Bernd Holznagel, including Dr Gunnar Bender and Andreas Grunwald, and particularly the 'unsung hero' of the past three issues, Production Director Christian Sommer. It is interesting to note that it is the US and German authors who have tended to contribute the majority of shorter, more opinion-comment oriented articles (this when one might typically expect larger US articles and language skills to dictate shorter European contributions). All have been published in PDF house style with maximum efficiency at minimum notice (!), and the editors of individual issues extend their thanks and hopes of continued outstandingly productive relationships with all concerned.

Readership Stats?

The statistics demonstrate a lack of South Asian, Arab, sub-Saharan African and Latin American authors thus far: we hope that the increasing readership of the journal in these territories will be reflected in increasing submission of drafts for refereeing. Further, we are conscious that the subject matter we cover may have reflected an unconscious bias towards any one of our three substantive issue areas: media, telecoms or Internet regulation. Further, the potential for law school bias is very evident, but economists, communications specialists, political scientists, sociologists and others have been evident.
It is our intention to continue to accept for publication a carefully eclectic range of contributions, interdisciplinary, inter-continental and interacting between professional and academic communities. To that end, we continue to invite articles and commentaries, together with book and conference reviews. To increase the interactivity of the journal, we invite Letters to the Editor, whether for publication in a future Feature of each journal issue, or private correspondence. Readers will have taken advantage of opportunities to interact with authors, both via email and - we hope - in person at conferences and on other suitable occasions (hence the 'mugshot' of each author). We encourage wider dialogue with editorial and advisory board members. The journal's function is to encourage communications law and policy dialogue on an international, interdisciplinary and inter-institutional (public-private) basis. We hope that these first five issues mark a start towards that goal.

The Editors

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