The Getulio Vargas Foundation (Fundação Getulio Vargas – FGV) has as its mission, “to contribute to the socio-economic development of the country, the improvement of national ethical standards, a responsible and shared governance, and the presence of the country in the international arena.”
Ten years since the first edition of DIREITO GV LAW REVIEW (REVISTA DIREITO GV) we have the opportunity to evaluate its performance and accomplishments until now and reflect on the role that the publication will have in the years ahead in the context of FGV’s important mission. This broader reflection, connected to the ultimate purposes of the journal, needs to be linked with a realistic discussion of the daily challenges of producing a high-quality law journal in Brazil and how to make the publication well known and also attractive for a broad and qualified community of readers, authors and reviewers.
When the Getulio Vargas Foundation’s São Paulo Law School (FGV DIREITO SP) was founded 10 years ago, the decision was made to create a law journal that would both include more innovative Brazilian and International juridical scholarship and would help think and rethink Brazil’s legal institutions. Therefore, DIREITO GV LAW REVIEW was created in order to be generalist regarding its themes, theoretical and methodological approaches, without becoming lost in the platitudes and truisms of traditional legal research.
It can be observed that during these 10 years the published texts have shared some fundamental concerns. The first one was to open the journal to interdisciplinary approaches and for studies based on empirical methodologies, until then uncommon in legal scholarship. Regarding sociology, history and philosophy of law, the journal’s preference was always to publish articles that would amplify and modify the research agenda, as well as methodological and theoretical references. The challenge was to escape from simple bibliographic digests or non-critical presentations of the state of the art regarding a certain field, debate or author.
In legal doctrine our preference was to publish articles that would critically discuss the features and borders of legal thinking, or that would bring novel ideas to solve new and complex juridical questions. Throughout the years, the journal sought both works that were far from the traditional model of legal research, whose reasoning frequently is similar to a petition or a legal opinion, as well as research that escaped from the sterile and repetitive style of Brazilian black letter law books.
Aligned with the research themes developed by FGV DIREITO SP’s masters programs, research centers and study groups, in the last few years the journal started to intensify its preference for publishing research related to Law & Development, Law & Society and Law & Economics. In addition, the publication also took an interest in articles on legal education, which is one more vehicle for the strengthening of FGV DIREITO SP’s commitment to the transformation and improvement of legal education in Brazil.
What unites FGV DIREITO SP’s research themes, and reminds us of FGV’s mission, is the commitment to the advance and universalisation of the Rule of Law in Brazil and the special attention given to the elaboration of diagnostics and production of empirical data about the interpretation and application of statutes and proposals of alterations of the Brazilian legal ordering, as well as the qualification of institutions responsible for the interpretation and application of the Law doctrine.
DIREITO GV LAW REVIEW intends to be a public good, which connects FGV DIREITO SP with the Brazilian and international academic community in order to advance these commitments and research subjects.
Regarding the daily challenges of producing a high-quality legal journal in Brazil, this seems an opportune moment to analyze, through some quantitative data, how the journal has been performing over the years, particularly between 2009 and 2014. With the expansion of Brazilian juridical research in recent years, the journal has started to receive a larger number of articles per year, which has significantly increased the competitiveness of the selection process, enabling a rise in the quality of what is published.
As illustrated above, we closed the year of 2014 with a record number of 310 submissions of unedited articles, both national and foreign. The constant growth in the number of submissions indicates the consolidation of DIREITO GV LAW REVIEW as one of the most important legal publications in Brazil.
However, this growth imposes several challenges. The first one concerns the improvement of internal mechanisms of managing every stage of the article-selection process, including the receiving process, desk review, double blind peer review, sending the reviews to the authors, etc. To help overcome these challenges, until the end of 2015 DIREITO GV LAW REVIEW will implement a system of online submission to better manage articles and reviews.
The implementation of an online submission system will be decisive in providing more agility to each stage of the evaluation process, reducing its total time. We know that the increase in the number of submitted articles and the complexity of the evaluation process, particularly the stage of double blind peer review, cannot lead to an excessive lengthening of the time between submission and publication, especially in the face of the well-known pressures of academic productivity that burden professors and researchers today.
Regarding our concerns with the quality of publications and the adoption of the highest standards of academic ethics, since April 2015 we have been systematically using iThenticate, a software adopted by several well-known national and international journals. All the articles submitted to the journal are analyzed by the software, which points out the similarities percentages of texts available on the Internet. With this, the submission process becomes safer, avoiding the evaluation of articles that were already published or that present evidence of plagiarism or self-plagiarism.
Furthermore, we understand that the increase in submissions allows desk review to be stricter. Thus, only the articles that rigorously follow the journal’s editorial policy, and that contain the substantive features previously discussed (meaning articles with a real potential of publication) proceed to the next stage of double blind peer review.
Currently, with two issues and an average of 26 articles published per year, 8,4% of the submitted articles are published (2014).
With these reflections about the past and the future, we invite you to read this new issue.
Enjoy your reading!
Catarina Helena Cortada Barbieri
Editor-in-Chief
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
Jan-Jun 2015
