Abstract

A variety of factors has led to a considerable transformation in the substance and in the organization of law journals, particularly those dealing with public and constitutional law. The technical and institutional framework in which they operate has produced various effects, influencing and somehow affecting the way of working of their steering committees. From one side, the development of the electronic platforms has promoted the growth of a new and powerful instrument of production and dissemination of scientific research, the electronic journal, with innovative features structurally differentiating it from the traditional paper journal. From the other side, many regulatory changes about university recruiting and research quality assessment have triggered a series of processes which have had a highly significant (and potentially revolutionary) impact on the ways of production and dissemination of the scientific work, and therefore on the ways of organizing the instruments of such dissemination. The overlapping and the intertwining of these two phenomena has resulted in an irreversible transformation of the law journals panorama and of the way they organize their contents. The paper aims to critically analyze the repercussions and consequences of such metamorphosis on the ways in which the public and constitutional law journals contribute nowadays to the development and to the dissemination of the scientific research in their discipline area.