On 05-27-2016, a conference on Open Access in the legal sciences was held for the first time at the University of Bern. Experts and other interested parties wanted to get to the bottom of the question why free access to scientific information on the Internet, which Open Access provides, is not yet implemented in the legal sciences. The initial conference, which attracted over 50 participants, was followed by the second conference entitled “Open Access for the legal sciences – compulsory or private?” at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main from 10-18-2018 to 10-19-2018. As a result of the two days event with several presentations and discussions, Ivo Vogel (law specialist at the Berlin State Library) and Daniel Hürlimann (assistant professor for information law at the University of St. Gallen) initiated the creation of a network for future exchange on the topic, with a link to the conference website – www.jurOA.de.
Thus, JurOA is a network of and for experts and interested parties who are committed to highlighting and establishing the advantages of Open Access which are already recognized and used in many other disciplines, even in the field of legal sciences.
Following a two-year cycle, a third JurOA conference should have taken place at the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences in 2020. However, due to the persistent global COVID-19 pandemic, this has been postponed to 2022.