On May 8th, Cornell Law Library launched LawArXiv, a repository for legal scholarship. LawArXiv is free and open source for the benefit of the legal community. The repository is run on the Open Science Framework (OSF), a web application of the non-profit technology start-up Center for Open Science (COS). To develop LawArXiv, Cornell Law Library partnered with the Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA), the Mid-American Law Library Consortium (MALLCO), and NELLCO Law Library Consortium Inc. The UVic Law Library is a member of NELLCO, and so LawArXiv represents one of the positive and tangible outcomes of our membership fees.
This free, open access repository is owned and will be maintained by the legal scholarship community and law librarians of Cornell. Legal scholars can contribute preprints or post-prints where the author has the copyright of their published research. As a community-owned repository, LawArXiv can be seen as an instrument for protecting the integrity of the legal scholarly community and preventing legal research from being overwhelmed by the profit motivations that govern other repositories subject to corporate interests. As expressed by Tracy Thompson, Executive Director of NELLCO: “Taking access to scholarship out of the commercial marketplace, through a non-profit collaboration like LawArXiv, just makes good sense. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but having choices levels the playing field for scholars and researchers alike.”
Visit LawArXiv, or check their twitter feed listing new papers that have been uploaded to the site.