Bepress is pleased to announce a new portal for open-access legal scholarship: the Law Review Commons. The site brings together a growing collection of law reviews and legal journals in an easily browsable and searchable format. It contains both current issues and archival content spanning over 100 years from nearly 150 law reviews.
All Law Review Commons publications are made freely available online through their law schools’ bepress Digital Commons repositories. The Commons includes many of the leading U.S. law reviews—such as the California Law Review and the Duke Law Journal.
The effort to make all legal scholarship freely and openly accessible has rapidly gained momentum since 2008, when law library directors from 12 top law schools authored the Durham Statement, calling on all law reviews and legal journals to begin publishing in “stable, open, digital formats.” Publishing open access increases the visibility of legal scholarship, makes scholars’ work more discoverable, and may also lead to more citations. Our analysis found that citation growth rates of open access journals were 3.8 times higher than for comparable non open access journals in 2012.
With almost 150 law reviews currently hosted in Digital Commons repositories and new additions each month, the Law Review Commons keeps growing. If your school has a law review or legal journal that’s not yet included in your Digital Commons repository, contact Consulting Services to begin the setup process. You can also learn more from the webinar “Digitally Archiving your Law Reviews: from Planning to Population“, by the College of William & Mary law library.
If you’re interested in learning more about Digital Commons for law reviews, contact bepress.