Law schools and Digital Commons
This has been a very interesting year for institutional repositories among law schools. Over the last few years, there has been a trend for academic institutions to create digital repositories both for archival purposes and to provide greater access to their faculty’s scholarship. Some solutions that have been in the market include Dspace and Fedora Commons. These systems, however, have proven to be difficult to use for most libraries which have affected their adoption rates. Although they are fairly easy to setup, these digital repository systems require maintenance which is problematic as technical support is not offered for these open-source solutions. Seeing an opportunity, Berkeley Electronic Press has embarked on a digital repository project of its own called Digital Commons. This system has a number of significant advantages over the previous offerings. For one, all the back-end and maintenance is done by Berkeley Electronic Press themselves. Secondly, BePress already owns Expresso - the system most law professors (and students) use to make electronic submissions to law reviews and journals. By integrating the repository with the submission system, BePress has created a product that is much more likely to be adopted, and used, by law faculty.
The issue that needs to be confronted, however, is how to convince law faculty that there is added value in using their institution’s digital repository along with SSRN. As you may know, SSRN (Social Science Research Network) is used by a majority of law faculty to host their scholarship before they submit it for publication. The “legal audience” is already there at SSRN. What many law professors fail to realize, however, is that while SSRN has a legal audience, the system itself is not designed for access or discovery. SSRN has very poor search engine optimization which makes finding legal scholarship difficult if users are not already familiar with the author or the title of the article. This is where Digital Commons can provide additional value. The strong point of Digital Commons is that the system is designed for discovery by search engines. The University of Maryland discovered that when materials were hosted on both SSRN and Digital Commons the download rates increased by 400% and the audience from SSRN remained stable – meaning that Digital Commons is bringing in new readers, not cannibalizing them from SSRN.
Law libraries are quickly seeing the value in Digital Commons in promoting their faculty’s scholarship. Just in the last 18 months, we have seen an explosion of law schools purchasing Digital Commons subscriptions. Additionally, many law schools are also purchasing LawKit from BePress which enables them to integrate their student law reviews into Digital Commons, including the submission process via Expresso. Frankly, I think this is very exciting for student law reviews. These journals are now open to a much wider audience, enabling these materials to be used by non-legal academics. If this trend continues, we may see that the Durham Statement (a proposal to enable wider access to legal scholarship) becomes a reality.
Resources:
- Santa Clara Law Digital Commons
- Institutional Repositories at Law Schools : Trends and Triumphs (CALI Conference 2011 presentation)
