General information

The Institute provides an important site for publication of innovative law and society research. Our workshops offer a very good basis for developing high quality publications, which we are happy to support.

Our Journals

On the one hand, we publish two open access, double-blind peer-reviewed online journals: Oñati Socio-legal Series (included in Clarivate's Web of Science ESCI and Elsevier Scopus indices), founded in 2011, which includes individual submissions, as well as articles resulting from our workshop programme, and Sortuz: Oñati Journal of Emergent Socio-Legal Studies, founded in 2007, indexed in Scopus, too, and devoted to strengthening the emerging community around the relations between law and society through the publication of quality research.

A distinctive sign of Oñati Socio-Legal Series and of Sortuz is that they lie on a universal principle of Full APC (Article Processing Charges) Waiver. This is a consequence of its belonging to the Oñati IISL, a non-profit Foundation. Application of this fee waiver shall be understood as an in-kind contribution to global socio-legal scholarship, and a real commitment to open access to knowledge. The APC Waiver means that the IISL's regular annual budget and staff provides the same world-quality services as other journals of equivalent quality and global outreach, at no cost to contributing authors or editors, whereas most Open Access journals have a policy of Article Processing Charges that average out on 1,865 USD, according to recent studies (Solomon and Björk, cited by Ferrer-Sapena et al. 2021)¹. The generally accepted average price for Western Europe and the US is about 2000 EUR, and prices continue to increase slowly, according to a survey by Dan Pollock and Heather Staines for Delta Think (2023), who state that the average fully OA APC had increased by 4.3% since 2022.²

On the other hand, we publish two book series: one in English, Oñati International Series in Law and Society, which is published by Bloomsbury-Hart, and the other in Spanish, Colección Oñati: Derecho y Sociedad, published by Dykinson.

Oñati International Series in Law and Society

The volumes in the Oñati International Series in Law and Society are eclectic in their disciplines, methodologies and theoretical perspectives, but they all share a strong comparative emphasis. The volumes originate in workshops hosted by the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law. Book proposals are carefully edited in-house at Hart, and then sent out to external reviewers. This prestigious book series was published by Ashgate first (1996 through 2000) and by Hart Publishing (now part of Bloomsbury) since 2000. Authors and editors who contribute to it have access to Bloomsbury's well-established sales and distribution network. Each of these edited collections is aimed at, and accessible to an international audience. This Series is included in Clarivate's Web of Science Core Collection's Book Citation Index.

Open Access:

Hart offers two routes to make content available in Open Access:

• Open access publication (‘gold open access’): The full eBook is made freely available on the Bloomsbury Collections platform under a Creative Commons licence that allows free access, sharing and re-use (the extent of re-use depends on the licence). Typically Hart will levy a book processing charge (BPC) – usually paid by your funder sponsor or institution – to cover costs of publication.

• Self-archiving (‘green open access’): If your book is published under standard (non-open access) terms, you can make a chapter freely available by archiving a digital copy in your funder or institution’s repository or social sharing site six months after publication. This can be deposited as an Accepted Manuscript or as the final Version of Record. Hart asks that when depositing your chapter you provide a link to the book’s web page on the Hart website.  Ahead of archiving your chapter on an institutional or subject repository please ensure that you have completed and returned this form to claire.weatherhead@bloomsbury.com. You can find more information here.

Oñati: Derecho y Sociedad

Oñati: Derecho y Sociedad is published by the prestigious specialized publishing-house Dykinson, and distributed through its network of libraries. These edited volumes in Spanish offer the latest advances and trends in sociology of law both in Spain and in Latin America. They are reviewed and curated by the IISL's panel of series editors, and carefully edited in-house. Groups holding a workshop at the IISL have the option of submitting a proposal for publication with Dykinson. Publishing in this series carries the following advantages:

•     Publication with a prestigious publisher (the option to publish under these terms is favorable with respect to ANECA).
•     Economic terms: on consensus of all authors, a 10% royalty is paid to them, and this amount must go to a single person or institution.
•     To publish with a publisher aligned with ANECA's recommendations that the work be available in institutional Open Access repositories.

Basque topics

We also pay attention to Basque topics and those related to the Basque Country. In 2018 the Institute published the book Identitateak eta euskal zuzenbideak. Indagaciones sobre identidades y derecho vasco (Enquiries into Basque identities and laws) with contributions in four languages. The IISL also groups in a special section references to all the works on Basque topics that it has been publishing since 1989. All of them are available either by direct download from the web or in the Institute's library.

[1] Ferrer-Sapena, Antonia; Vidal-Cabo, Christian; Aleixandre-Benavent, Rafael; Valderrama-Zurián, Juan Carlos (2021). Coste de la publicación en abierto de artículos de autoría española en cinco áreas de las ciencias sociales. Arbor, 197(799): a590. https://doi.org/10.3989/ARBOR.2021.799005

[2] Pollock, D., and Staines, H., 2023. News & Views: Open Access charges - Popular price bands become more expensive. Delta Think, 25 April. https://deltathink.com/news-views-open-access-charges-popular-price-bands-become-more-expensive/