The Columbia Science and Technology Law Review (STLR) deals with the exciting legal issues surrounding science and technology, including patents, the Internet, biotechnology, nanotechnology, telecommunications, and the implications of technological advances on traditional legal fields such as contracts, evidence, and tax. Recent articles have discussed the practice of paying to delay the entrance of generic pharmaceuticals, proposals for expanding legal technologies focused on online dispute resolution, the rise of facial recognition technology in society and in law enforcement, the proliferation of artificial intelligence and its impact on intellectual property, the spread of misinformation as a consequence of poor data privacy protections, and protecting access to the internet in times of armed conflict.
STLR publishes twice a year. If you’d like to submit your article for consideration, please see our Submissions page.
We’re a successful traditional law journal, but we’re also constantly looking to use technology and the Web to make our journal more relevant and more interesting. We were the first Columbia journal with a blog, publishing not just on our own site but also on top technology blogs like Gizmodo and Engadget. And we were the first Columbia journal to become formally Open Access, giving our authors the broadest possible exposure for their work by eliminating unnecessary barriers to readership.
We follow the traditional Columbia Law School procedures for journal admission. Interested students should reach out to our Editorial Board.
Open Access Policy
STLR is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. Since 2014, authors retain their copyright and agree to license their articles with a Creative Commons CC-BY "Attribution" License. You can read more about Creative Commons licenses at creativecommons.org.
STLR is a no-fee journal. Authors are not charged for the publication of their articles.
Peer Review Policy
All authors' submissions undergo a preliminary screening by the Submissions Editor to determine whether an article meets high standards of quality and its content fits with the journal's scope and mission. Once an article is found to align with the journal’s interests, selected members of the Editorial Board read the article, review the author’s credentials, and make a collective decision on whether to extend a publication offer. If the author contracts with the journal, the editing process will be carried out by the Articles Editor and journal's staffers in coordination with the author. The EIC reviews the final version and approves it for publication.
Archiving Policy
STLR is distributed through Columbia University’s Academic Commons. Academic Commons is Columbia University’s institutional repository, offering long-term public access to research shared by the Columbia community. A program of the Columbia University Libraries, Academic Commons provides secure, replicated storage for files in multiple formats. Academic Commons assigns a DOI and accurate metadata to each work to enhance discoverability.
Files uploaded to Academic Commons are written to an Isilon storage cluster at Columbia University and replicated to an identical system at a secure, offsite facility. The local cluster stores the data in a "best protection possible" policy which provides, at a minimum, guaranteed protection against the loss of any two disks or any one node. When sufficient capacity is available, this is increased automatically. Multiple snapshots are replicated to our disaster recovery site every two hours. The secondary cluster employs the same protections as the primary cluster and both conduct integrity scans to validate that data has not been altered at any point during rebalancing, snapshot, or replication processes.