Yale Law School has launched a new program aimed at open access to legal scholarship named, Law Archive. The new system is engineered to provide a holistic, open and free platform for publishing legal scholarship, an effort to steer clear of ‘proprietary and predatory frameworks’.
The Law Archive is developed and maintained by Yale’s Lillian Goldman Law Library and the Center for Open Science (COS), the same group providing the OSF Preprints platform which hosts the site. This platform allows scholars and researchers to upload research plans, preprints (articles still in process of peer review), fully published papers, and collected data.
Femi Cadmus, law librarian and professor at Yale, who also leads Law Archive’s advisory board and steering committee, noted the restricted options for researchers to deposit their work in a repository without incurring some type of cost, either monetary or through loss of data control. The main objective behind Law Archive is to sweep away these barriers, offering a truly open and inclusive platform for research sharing.
A notable motive of this initiative is to augment access to justice by filling information gaps in the sphere of legal knowledge free from proprietary frameworks. The yearning for current and historical legal commentary and analysis available freely has also led to the birth of Law Archive.
The unique feature about Law Archive is that it is the only free open-access platform that integrates tools for collaboration, data storage, and sharing of legal scholarship. It not only allows scholars from different institutions to work on projects but also supports the integration of commercial tools such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and Github.
This comes as a successor to the previous attempt at open access to legal scholarship, LawArXiv, which ended up pulling down its shutters due to financial constraints and certain limitations of the OSF Preprints platform. However, with the launch of the new Yale Archive, the OSF Preprints platform has gone through significant enhancements aiming at better user experience and increased community engagement.
The archive is supported by an advisory board led by Cadmus and includes faculty and librarians from six institutions. Managed at the Yale law library by a steering committee and administrators Michael VanderHeidjen, associate director, scholarly & research services, and Nor Ortiz, technology & research librarian, the project has demonstrated unwavering commitment towards providing free and open legal scholarship.