Legal Cyber Academy
JournalFreeSuperseded or dormant

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Association of Digital Forensics, Security and Law (ADFSL), hosted by Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University · 2006

Identifier: ISSN 1558-7223

Access and status

Cost

Free

Free to read or download at source. No account, no purchase.

Status

Superseded or dormant

Superseded, replaced or no longer being updated. The archive may still be worth reading, but do not cite it as current practice.

What it is

An open-access, double-blind peer-reviewed journal that deliberately sat at the intersection of digital forensics, security and law, published by ADFSL and hosted on Embry-Riddle's Scholarly Commons under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence. Volume 1 appeared in 2006 and the archive currently stops at Volume 17 (2022); the journal's own site states it is not taking new submissions at this time.

Who it is for, and when

Useful to lawyers and testifying examiners precisely because it accepted work from law, criminal justice and the social sciences alongside computer science, so it carries admissibility, policy and practice-of-the-field papers that a pure computing venue would reject. Every article is a free PDF with no sign-in, which makes it easy to attach to a report or hand to opposing counsel. Treat it as a 2006-2022 archive to mine rather than a current-awareness feed.

What it does not cover

It is publishing nothing new — submissions are closed and there has been no content since 2022, so nothing here reflects developments in the last few years. Coverage of specific modern artefacts (recent iOS and Android versions, current cloud platforms) is therefore thin to absent.

Go to the source

Open at commons.erau.edu (opens in a new tab)

https://commons.erau.edu/jdfsl/

Details

Type
Journal
Written for
Working examinerLawyers and courtsAdvancedWorking examiner, Lawyers and courts, Advanced
Publisher
Association of Digital Forensics, Security and Law (ADFSL), hosted by Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Year
2006
Identifier
ISSN 1558-7223
Topics
research-publishing, open-access, legal-admissibility, peer-review
Checked at source
  • A peer-reviewed law journal founded in 2012 covering the law of cyber conflict — attribution and evidence, sovereignty, national security policy, autonomous and AI-enabled systems, and critical infrastructure defence. It is indexed in HeinOnline's Law Journal Library and in JSTOR, and is actively publishing through 2026.

  • The report from the first Digital Forensic Research Workshop, held in 2001, which set out a research agenda and a shared vocabulary for a field that at that point had neither. It is the document that proposed the examination process framework and the term 'digital forensic science', and it is conventionally cited as Palmer (2001); DFRWS's own page for it names no individual author.

  • NIST's scientific foundation review of digital forensics, examining the peer-reviewed literature, academic material and practitioner guidance behind digital investigation techniques. It concludes the techniques rest on established computer science methods and are reliable when properly applied, while naming specific limits.

  • The peer-reviewed paper track of the DFRWS conferences, which have run since the first workshop in 2001 and now cover three regions — DFRWS USA, DFRWS EU (rebranding as the Digital Forensics Conference Europe) and DFRWS APAC. DFRWS's own submission rules confirm accepted research papers are published as special issues of Forensic Science International: Digital Investigation.

  • The main peer-reviewed research journal for digital forensics. It was called Digital Investigation from 2004 through 2019 and was folded into Elsevier's Forensic Science International family in 2020, when the new title and ISSN 2666-2817 took over; the DFRWS USA, EU and APAC conferences publish their accepted research papers here as special issues.