Institutional Repositories Offer New Avenues for Publishing Student Scholarship

Modern law students must write scholarly articles to fulfill upper level writing requirements or write theses and dissertations to receive graduate law degrees.  Except for the few students who succeed in publishing a law review note, however, most law students will have limited opportunities to publish their work.  An exciting development emerging from the application of open access principles to legal scholarship is the use of institutional repositories to publish student scholarship.  Access to this work has previously been scanty because it was rarely published, and even more rarely indexed. Print collections, where they exist, are created by binding and cataloging the material for local collections.  The exception are law theses and dissertations from major programs which have been filmed and indexed by William S Hein & Co., Inc., to be sold as a microfiche collection; however, production costs are steep, and so is the price. Consequently, this collection is not widely held by U.S. law libraries.  Instead, if law schools created digital collections of these works by loading them into institutional repositories, the papers would be indexed by Internet search engines and would be freely available to the world at large. 

The students’ scholarship would attain visibility on a scale never before seen, and the students would enjoy the benefit of informing the subsequent work of others. Plagiarism should not be an issue because most institutional repositories are indexed at the full-text level, meaning that a simple Google search would quickly identify an existing paper that was later used without proper attribution.  Moreover, providing open access to student works in institutional repositories does not preclude their later publication.  In any case, because many of these student works are rarely published elsewhere, there is no existing publication structure to be threatened by open access publishing of them. 

Digital collections of student work can also be used for publicity and outreach, especially with alumni. Many schools already inform alumni of  recent faculty publications; alumni could also be informed of student scholarship published in repositories.  Making student scholarship available in digital collections provides students with a connection to their schools after graduation.

Law schools would also be sending the message that they take student scholarship seriously. Knowing that their work will also be subject to scrutiny beyond the four walls of their professors’ offices would give law students added incentive to produce better scholarship.  Law schools are in a position to go so far as to mandate submission of theses, dissertations, and other student papers into institutional repositories as a condition of graduation. Doing so would make a statement in support of open access that is consistent with the culture and values of legal educators and with our tradition of public access to legal information.  Alternatively, law schools may choose to limit publication to top papers, works that have been endorsed by a faculty member, or works that otherwise have earned the imprimatur of the law school before placing them in an institutional repository.

Open access repositories of theses and dissertations in other disciplines have been in use for more than a decade.  Open access proponent, Peter Suber, has written extensively on open access to scholarship, including the use of institutional repositories for publishing student scholarship (for more information see, http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/07-02-06.htm#etds).  Currently, the Registry of Open Access Repositories (http://roar.eprints.org ) lists more than a dozen collections of student work; including the NELLCO Legal Scholarship Repository which is used by Vermont (http://lsr.nellco.org/vermontlaw/ldel/) and Cornell (http://lsr.nellco.org/cornell/lps/) law schools to publish LLM theses.

If you would like more information about the other potential uses of university IRs, feel free to contact me (cparker@law.unm.edu). 

[Derived from a work that is forthcoming in 37:2 New Mexico Law Review (Summer 2007)]

Carol A. Parker, Law Library Director & Assistant Professor of Law, University. of New Mexico School of Law