The Austrian RDB (Rechtsdatenbank) website has links to a number of databases and journals (via Handakte WebLAWg). Its main aim seems to be offering access, at a price, to a large number of journals, collections of cases and other resources (if you need fewer than 50 documents a month, there is still a setup cost of 243 euros and a cost of 4,13 for each RDB document search).
Free of charge: a magazine with a number of interesting articles, including one on Justitia 2003, the latest round in a competition for Austria’s best legal websites. Tax firm Szabo & Partner (with English and Hungarian versions – at a glance, the PDF documents are in better English than the sentences on the website), tax adviser Thomas Brandner, Ernst & Young Austria and the private investigation firm Bernhard Maier (with English and Greek versions – the English is not MT and is comprehensible) are some of the winners, as is the Bundeskanzleramt /Federal Chancellery site.
“Its main aim seems to be offering access, at a price, to a large number of journals, collections of cases and other resources”
Yes. The RDB is a joint venture (of long standing) by (to the best of my knwoledge: all) Austrian legal publishers (that is Manz, Orac, and Linde, and quite possibly Verlag Österreich.)
All the (hardcopy) legal journals and periodicals by these publishers are available online in a searchable format. They also used to provide court cases and laws. At least as far as laws are concerned, I seem to remember they ceased doing so given the competition by http://www.ris.bka.gv.at.
I do not know if this unfair competition case has been settled yet. The mutual content exchange agreement between the RDB and the RIS has been renounced, however, and the RIS now has to buy their content on a per document basis (for their intranet version for internal use). They do provide free access to law schools, however.
Also, RDB’s fee structure has been simplified somewhat in recent months (mainly doing away with time-based fees), but still remains somewhat elevated.
Thanks very much.