Opening the Access to International Legal Scholarship – an Introduction

Open Access, understood as the free accessibility and reusability of academic publications online, is hitting the shores of international law. The aim of this brief introduction is to show how the concept has found its way into international legal documents and become a frequently used publication modality for international legal scholars. However, I would also like to argue that treating Open Access as a mere technicality and publication modality does not do justice to its implications. Rather, the ongoing transformation to Open Access is a good moment to take a step back and address some fundamental questions concerning the politics of knowledge production in international legal scholarship and the constitution of the famous ‘invisible college of international lawyers’. As I would like to demonstrate, thinking about what ‘openness’ and ‘access’ to international legal scholarship mean, and should mean, turns our gaze to numerous questions that so far have largely escaped debate; questions seemingly only concerning the ‘backend’ of the knowledge production, but that nonetheless invisibly and often unnoticedly shape and frame our discipline.