In a bid to make legal scholarship readily accessible outside proprietary and predatory frameworks, Yale Law School has initiated the Law Archive, an open archive dedicated to the dissemination of legal scholarship. Developed by the Lillian Goldman Law Library at Yale and the Center for Open Science (COS), the archive grants researchers and scholars the ability to upload research plans, preprints (pre-peer-reviewed articles), fully vetted papers, and collected research data.
“There are limited options for researchers and scholars to deposit scholarship in a repository without bearing some type of cost”, said Femi Cadmus, a law librarian and professor of law at Yale, who leads Law Archive’s advisory board and steering committee. “The primary goal of Law Archive is to break down barriers to access to legal scholarship and information by developing a truly free and open platform for the sharing of research,” she added.
The development of the archive highlights the library’s commitment to access to justice initiatives. This repository ensures researchers, scholars, and the general public have a reliable source for accessing current and historical legal commentary and analysis found in legal scholarship.
The archive sets itself apart as the only free open access platform for legal scholarship that integrates collaboration tools, data storage, and sharing of legal scholarship. Its features enable researchers from different institutions to collaborate on projects in a central project space that can integrate tools such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and GitHub.
In supporting the site, users can refine their searches using keywords, browse papers by their subject, and use filters to refine results by date range and other parameters. The site also supports the sharing of transparent and reproducible research, a growing requirement of many funding agencies.
Yale Law School Dean Heather K. Gerken emphasized the importance of the Law Archive initiative, citing the critical need for free, reliable, and open access to legal scholarship. The archive is supported by an advisory board led by Cadmus and composed of law faculty and librarians from six institutions. It is administratively managed at the Yale Law Library by a steering committee and co-administrators.
This is not the inaugural attempt at launching an archive to promote open access to legal scholarship. In 2017, LawArXiv was developed by the Cornell Law Library and other collaborators. Like the latest archive, LawArXiv was hosted on the OSF Preprints platform. However, following its decision to stop accepting new article submissions in 2021, LawArxiv effectively ceased operations. The shutdown was attributed to the limitations of the OSF Preprints platform and its developer’s reluctance to support new features demanded by the LawArXiv steering committee.
Following its significant enhancements, COS recently released a post acknowledging these issues while announcing the launch of the new Yale archive. COS described these improvements as designed to enhance user experience, foster community engagement, and expand the discoverability of preprints and published papers. The post also emphasized the significance of Yale’s oversight of the archive for its long-term viability, citing the institution’s unwavering commitment to hosting free and open legal scholarship.