Institutional Repositories, Open Access, and Legal Scholarship

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2006 13:11:25 +0000

An informative and well-researched paper on Institutional Repositories and
Open Access. [Thanks to the Law Librarian Blog for announcement.]
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/law_librarian_blog/2006/12/professional_re_4.html

    Parker, Carole A. (2006) Institutional Repositories and the Principle
    of Open Access: Changing the Way We Think About Legal Scholarship. New
    Mexico Law Review. http://ssrn.com/abstract=928489
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID947600_code476003.pdf?abstractid=928489&mirid=1
    ABSTRACT: Open access to scholarship, that is, making scholarship
    freely available to the public via the Internet without subscription
    or access fees, is a natural fit for legal scholarship given our
    tradition of making government and legal information available to
    citizens, and the many benefits that flow from freely disseminating
    information for its own sake. Law schools, journals and scholars
    should espouse the principle of open access to legal scholarship,
    not only for the public good, but also for the enhanced visibility
    it provides journals and authors. Open access can be accomplished by
    archiving digital works in online institutional repositories. Legal
    scholars have enjoyed the benefits of open access to working paper
    repositories such as SSRN for more than ten years - even if they
    have not thought of this practice as 'open access.' It is a natural
    progression for legal scholars to now self-archive published
    works as well, and they are beginning to do so as awareness
    grows of the benefits of providing open access to published
    legal scholarship. Institutional repositories provide new ways to
    publish student scholarship, empirical data, teaching materials,
    and original historical documents uncovered during the research
    process. Author self-archiving does not threaten the existence of law
    school-subsidized journals, and institutional repositories generate
    new audiences for legal scholarship, including international and
    multidisciplinary audiences. Not insignificantly, repositories also
    help preserve digital work. Law schools are discovering that the
    publicity and download counts generated by repositories provide new
    ways to measure scholarly impact and reputation. Approximately 40%
    of U.S. law schools now have some form of institutional repository,
    all of which are indexed by Internet search engines. Law schools
    seeking to establish institutional repositories enjoy a variety of
    options to choose from, ranging from proprietary applications like
    Digital Commons, SSRN's Legal Scholarship Network, the Berkeley
    Electronic Press' Legal Repository, and NELLCO's Legal Scholarship
    Repository, to open source applications like EPrints and DSpace.
Received on Mon Dec 18 2006 - 13:52:10 GMT

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