In a week where we celebrate International Open Access Week and muse on the theme of Community over Commercialization,let’stake a look at how the Law community is embracing ‘open’ as a way towards equitable access.
Preprint servers are not new. But they may be undergoing a bit of an image makeover. They are a great way to get your work to the public – without waiting for that lengthy publishing process.A recent collab between Yale Law and OSF has given Law Archive a bit of a glow up!
OSF Partner with Yale Law
The Open Science Framework (OSF) has grown in popularity from its early adoption -mainly among psychologists. More researchers are discovering it’sa great place to collaborate, work, and to host data and code.
They now bring this capability to a partnership with Yale to entice the Law community to join the Open Research revolution.
A new platform – new features
Law Archive takes the place of the former law preprint service, LawArXiv. It has some great, shiny new features like Plaudit. This means that readers can automatically endorse articles in preprint.
One of the features that’s made OSF so popular as a research space is its ability to allow integrations with Dropbox, GoogleDrive and GitHub. Having the different threads of a research project together in one place makes it easy to share and get recognition for your work.
Equitable and Open
The Law Librarian at Yale Law School says ‘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’.
This breaking down of barriers to access benefits the Law community, but it also benefits the larger community as they reap the rewards of equitable access. As Michael VanderHeidjen says,‘ The law ought to be accessible to everyone’.
Anyone working in academia will know the cost of access to some legal texts and so these steps forward will come as a welcome step take us closer to community over commercialization.
